Paul Rigby
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Posts posted by Paul Rigby
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I have a hard time buying the idea that Kellerman and Greer were accomplices. Given the amount of bullets flying in to the car from all directions, it was a fluke that neither were hit.
I'd have to agree here....they would have to have unusually strong nerves and almost unlimited trust in the ability of the snipers if they were 'in on it'. While I don't rule out that some SS men might have been in cahoots, I doubt the two in the car with JFK would have been or could have been. They would have worn hardhats and bulletproof vests....and been drinking while driving. Their statements on their accounts of the number and timing of bullets adds a bit to my feeling on this also. If they were told there would be a 'hit' the only way would have been to tell them it was to be at a completely different location when they were not to be so close....as some speculate about JC.
WHOA!The slow turn, the braking, the failure to even coast at the cruising speed of a limo downhill,
the failure to secure overpasses, windows, fences, the RYBKA stand down, the POTUS in the lead car,
the braking and stopping/near stopping in the fire zone, the slow cruise after the initial throat shot to
Kennedy, the failure to etc...........
Shanet:
This is what I am getting at. There is too much denial regarding the Agent's behavior. You have outlined just a fraction of the Secret Service's unusual behavior which is written off as "mistakes" or excuses using a theory about "human behavior".
At the very least these folks should have been fired for their incompetence. Their stories made no sense and some were even promoted in later years. (bad things happened to a few)
Vince Palamara goes into this in great detail but I will address a few of Shanet's points.
1) The slow turn. Car should not go below 44 miles per hour, if so , protection needs to be "poored on"
( Prouty)
2) Greer's BRAKING , not even coasting. An automatic vehicle , like the limo, would coast downhill 20 miles an hour or more depending upon the idling speed. Whatever, it wouldn't be zero miles an hour. ( if you want to split hairs and come up with another figure! )
3) The lack of protection in the killing zone. Basic security was not present that afternoon. It was called off to enable the shooters to do their job. Protecting the President is what the Secret Service does. To suggest they did not realize something was up is ridiculous. Greer had 6 or 7 seconds to get out of there. He did not. Instead , he braked the car. Take a look at Reagan's assassination attempt. That is protection. That is what happens when shots are fired. NO ONE MOVED when the shots rang out in Dallas.
I agree that there was mass incompetence exhibited by the SS, but there is a difference between that and active conspiracy.
Were the SS commanders in on the conspiracy? Maybe... but I think the footsoldiers were unwitting dupes...
De Gaulle's driver, Francis Marroux, was loyal, with the consequence his boss survived ambush.
That wasn't going to happen on Elm.
Paul
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An interesting piece and very much on target for so soon after the WC was out.....! 'Funny' how no one in the NYT, for example, could grasp any of the points mentioned, let alone all of them.....those who look critically at the nation can usually see when the emperor is without his clothes....as can children....all the others are too busy or worried with the 'mortgage' et al.
Peter,
A lovely phrase, don't you think, "a real bucket of brainwash"?! And how much more accurate than the vast tracts of sycophantic bilge emanating from the NYT, WaPo, et al...
A further thought: Whatever the limitations of their political philosophy, there is no gainsaying the clarity of their analysis of JFK's murder.
Paul
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If Greer thought he might be driving into an ambush, and that gave him pause, why didn't he say so? Instead he chose to categorically lie under oath by saying he stepped on the gas and got out of there as soon as he knew what was happening. The WC had the Z film and knew Greer was lying to their faces.
Wouldn´t Greer have known what was happening even before the head shoot?He would have heard the "shots" that many spectators thought where firecrackers.
Should´t he have heard both JFK and Connoly (bad spelling) beeing shot.
Connoly even yelled out, "Oh my god they are killing us all"
And then realised whats was going on?
Dear Jorgen:
Of course he would have. But this is why the plan was so successful. It is so hard to believe , even when presented with imperical evidence , that one's own government would do this to it's President. So we all say "there had to be a reason, they were hungover, hesitant or poorly trained".
Greer and the other Agents were told to behave this way. They were simply performing their job.
Peter/Jorgen,
Not so hard to believe of the U.S. government, surely? Recall that Lincoln's bodyguard went conveniently missing just in time for John Wilkes Booth's arrival.
This assassination had rough precedent.
Paul
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Labour Monthly, November 1964, pp.499-503, & 506-509
The Warren Report
By Ivor Montagu
Legend already relates that when Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed to accept the Chairmanship of the Kennedy Enquiry Commission he wept. He had good reason. Just as others had good reason to press him to undertake it. It is interesting to speculate what would have been the reception of its report had the Commission been headed by another of its members – for instance Alan Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency chief whom Kennedy let go after the Bay of Pigs, or McCloy, ex-High Commissioner in Germany, or either of the racist Democratic Senators (from Georgia and Louisiana) or the Goldwaterite Republican. ‘But Brutus is an honourable man.’ Or so said Marc Anthony when he was commenting upon another murder by conspiracy. In that case, Julius Caesar. In this, the truth itself. As it is, because of Brutus, the conspiracy has got off to a fair start. Not so fair as the reader of the British press, with its unanimous hooflick nowadays in response to any ‘moo’ of the Washington sacred cow, might imagine however. The headline in the New York Times on the day following publication (September 29) reads: ‘WARREN FINDINGS SATISFY OFFICIALS IN WEST EUROPE: MUCH OF PUBLIC SCEPTICAL.’ Just so.
The main impact of the report is its voluminousness. It is a real bucket of brainwash. 718 often repetitious pages, a list of 552 witnesses, innumerable staff, a score or so of volumes of testimony promised ultimately – who, after this, would be ungrateful enough to doubt the thoroughness with which the job was done. The old army sweat will easily recognise this technique. It was called he was hauled before the C.O., ‘blinding him with science.’ And the job? To divert attention from the source that stood out as most obviously to be accused.
In the January issue of this magazine, before ever the Commission got down to work, the editor outlined the case, the obvious pointers to C.I.A., F.B.I. and the Dallas police, that the world had seized upon and that these agencies of national and local government had to answer. Cumulatively it was damning. Every one of the counts that he enumerated is confirmed in the report. And much more. The sins of omission, the sins of commission, the facts that arouse suspicion.
It cannot be said that these accused were totally disregarded. The former head of one – Allen Dulles – sat actually on the Commission. The gathering of facts was completely – or in effect completely - entrusted to the second, the F.B.I. That neither was linked to the crimes in any way is concluded from the assurances of their chiefs. The assurance of Mr. McCone. The assurance of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. Both gentlemen, through their subordinates, were kind enough to produce files. The CIA found no blameworthy association of Oswald with the CIA. The FBI found no blameworthy association between him and the FBI. Again and again, when a piece of evidence is cited that points in these directions we are told that the FBI found no confirmation. Exactly. There was no cross examination. When relatives of the bumped-off Lee Harvey Oswald asked to appoint counsel to represent him, they were refused. Half-way through, the Commission got cold feet about this and appointed a respected officer of the Court (who hardly ever bothered to attend), a distinguished Goldwaterite, to advise them whether they were being fair. How one would have liked to hear Lawrence Preston, or even Perry Mason, have a go at this sort of thing.
From the beginning of course, the Commission assumed that U.S. agencies cannot frame, cannot fake evidence, cannot lie. Behind them were Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Hoffa, the Presidential assurances about the U2, Adlai Stevenson’s assurances to the United Nations about the Bay of Pigs. The ink was scarcely blotted on the confessions about the pretended incidents in the Bay of Tonking. But this was its assumption. It remarks firmly that after the releases and pictures and allegations about Lee Harvey Oswald it would have been impossible to ensure a fair trial because of the assumptions any possible jury would make. And then it makes the same assumptions its own whole point of departure in a trial in which his voice was silenced.
Its starting point and its end: not only that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, but that he did it alone. This ‘alone’ was vital. Some people may wonder why, after the careful construction of threads tying Oswald to the U.S.S.R., to Communists, Trotskyists, Cuba, etc., someone changed his mind and the ‘alone’ version, followed by the Commission, was followed instead, from within an hour or two of his arrest. Someone was sensible. These threads were altogether too thin and must snap under any weight. It was too dangerous to have any live accused whose counter-attack might smash the whole thing. After all, the Reichstag Fire Trial was not without its lesson. To prove the Communists guilty, the prosecution revealed evidence that Van der Lubbe could not have done the job alone. As nothing could implicate the Communists, the Nazis pointed at themselves and all the efforts nowadays to whitewash them are bound to fail. How much handier to have bumped off Van der Lubbe on the spot, instead of merely drugging him, and then had a posthumous enquiry commission with Goering as a member and the Gestapo in sole control of collecting evidence.
To reach their preordained conclusion, the Commission had to do some splendid wriggling. The student of the report will notice three outstanding features. First, that when there is any conflict of evidence the Commission threads itself neatly through it, adopting anything consistent with its theory, dismissing as ‘mistaken’ anything that contradicts it. The doctors who first examined Kennedy thought he was shot from the front. Easy, they were mistaken. Some witnesses thought the shots heard were fired from the depository, some from the bridge. Easy, the first were right, the second wrong. Contradictions in time and identity alike are solved by this convenient formula. However, sometimes this wears a little thin. Witnesses who saw Oswald in inconvenient places were mistaken in their recognition – they had seen T.V. pictures of him and this vitiates their evidence. But on the other hand, in their conclusion the Commission claim that nine witnesses saw Oswald kill Tippett or run away after his murder. It becomes a little ingenuous of them to ignore (what they admit later in their text) that the same reservation applies to these. Sometimes they make downright mistakes. One awkward identification of Oswald is dismissed because the ‘Oswald’ seen got drunk, and Lee Harvey, the Commission says, did not drink. But the report later describes an incident in which he did, most thoroughly. (Incidentally, a tantalising reference occurs (p.628) to ‘the English language edition of the Daily Worker,’ allegedly read by Oswald. One would like to know more about this paper.)
On one crucial question let us examine the Commission’s treatment of the question whether it was possible for a man like Oswald to fire the shots and hit the President. This is a clear example of its method. It knows that there is a great question whether one man with such a rifle could accurately have fired the number of shots available in the given time. So first it is anxious to minimise the number of shots. After a lot of weighing and microscopic examination of the bullets (and no explanation of the interval before traces of bullets were looked for on the ground) it concludes that the number must have been three or four and plumps for three. After analysing the evidence of times shots were heard and wounds were seen it comes to the conclusion that if, of the three bullets fired, two hit Kennedy and one hit Governor Connolly the time necessary would have been 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. But this is inconvenient because it comes too close to the time taken for these shots in their tests. So they have the magnificent idea that if one shot missed, and if this was not the middle one but the first or third, the time evidence could be held to give up to 7.1 or even 7.9 seconds. Accordingly in their report they not only state it as a possibility, that one shot hit both Kennedy and Connolly, but conclude it as a fact, loading a headline THE SHOT THAT MISSED, although this is absolutely contrary not only to Connolly’s impression but to the insistent evidence of Connolly’s wife, also in the car, who is determined it was after Kennedy was hit that she heard the shot that hit her husband. The Commission argue that this is perfectly consistent with their conclusion because sound does not travel instantaneously. According to the distance it gives, the sound would have reached Mrs. Connolly in about 1/6th of a second. (This is not one of the figures in the generous avalanche of technical data.)
Next, they take a rifle found in the book depository and arrange for three expert shots to try to shoot three targets arranged at intervals corresponding in angle and distance to the positions of the Presidential car in the probable interval of time. They succeed, but dangerously near the minimum. But why in the tests where the targets not moving? And, above all, why experts? The evidence the Commission itself cites shows that Oswald’s ability was nowhere near the expert’s. ‘Expert’ is the top category of three. Oswald in the marines had two tests. One gave him a bare two marks above the minimum for the second category. The other (later) placed him well down in the third (the lowest). The Commission’s comment on this latter test is characteristic. Without a shred of evidence it suggests that at the time it might have been raining. And yet now two, possibly all three of his shots were hits. Why do the tests with experts? They quote evidence from Oswald’s wife, that he had practised a dry run (loading and unloading) apparently with this rifle. They have no testimony that he ever fired a single practice shot with it. They argue that his task of aiming anew for each shot was made easier because the car was going down a slope of 3 degrees. The height of the building is one of the relevant figures omitted. But the distances are given, the minimum height for the sixth floor is not hard to gauge from the photographs and trigonometry shows this special pleading pretty weak.
The second feature: that the main sustaining evidence against Oswald has been provided by his wife – who, of course, could not have been made to testify against him at all had this been a trial. The evidence of the other parties is thin and contradictory, doubtful recognitions, selected assumptions, behaviour without rhyme or reason. It is entirely the testimony of Marina, the Russian-born wife, that puts flesh and blood on the flimsy skeleton. Marina, who speaks no English, who first declared her disbelief in her husband’s guilt, who was placed, in effect, incommunicado by the F.B.I as soon as the crime was committed and who the Commission triumphantly boasts in its conclusions, has now changed her view. Marina, against whom, as is clear from the report, the U.S. authorities have a clear case whenever they like to press it, for false statement on her immigration form. The Commission are faced with a problem: how to account for Oswald, with a complete absence of any violence on his previous record, having suddenly taken to assassination. So Marina comes to the rescue with a story that he earlier tried to shoot General Walker. How this marksman, capable of accurate shots from an unfamiliar stance in a few seconds against a moving target came then to miss a sitting target, in a location that, according to the report, he had previously prepared and studied, and with all the time in the world at his disposal, is not even discussed by the Committee. It is Marina, too, who helps to whitewash the most damning document admitted by the Committee; the notation of a local F.B.I. officer’s name and address in Oswald’s notebook. Explanation: the F.B.I. made a routine call on the woman with whom Marina was staying, told her Oswald was a suspicious character and left his name and address so she could report to him on his activities. So the woman promptly gave the name and address to Marina who gave it to Oswald who wrote it in his notebook. Really, there seems no limit to the credulity expected of the public by the Commission and the F.B.I.
The third remarkable feature is the amount of space devoted to psychologising Lee Harvey Oswald. Or perhaps it is not remarkable considering the role played in contemporary U.S. society by the psychologist as a sort of sorcerer or medicine man. The Commission is desperately anxious to discover a motive for this man, who never spoke against Kennedy, had no grudge against Kennedy, suddenly deciding on his own to shoot Kennedy. They even, in one place, suggest (while declaring themselves not convinced) that it was because he had just heard his wife running down his sexual ability in the presence of third parties. This mania for finding the simple inexplicable and resorting to ‘psychology,’ reminds of Honor Tracy’s account, in her book on McArthur’s occupation of Japan, of the two G.I.s who were noticed enjoying their doxies in broad daylight on a public hard tennis court in Tokyo, and were remitted to the psychiatric ward for study on why they were doing it. For, on the assumption of the Committee, that he and he alone is the assassin, the case is certainly a problem. The young man who claims he was first attracted to Communism at the age of 16 – and at 20 promptly joins the U.S. marines; who spends his time in the marines – studying the Russian language and Marxism. The flourishing ex-marine - who has money to go to U.S.S.R. The disillusioned anti-communist who writes an exposure of Soviet society on his way home – and on arrival, instead of publishing it, promptly takes out a subscription to the Worker instead. The unemployed man who spends his spare servings on printing propaganda and a visit to Mexico. This intending assassin who draws attention to himself by getting on radio and arrested as a supporter of ‘Fair Play for Cuba,’ and creating a row in Mexico City at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies – and leaves conveniently at his home a photograph of himself with a pistol and rifle holding copies of the Worker and the Militant. All that of course takes some psychologising – if you make the Commission’s assumption. No psychology can explain (so of course the Commission does not attempt to) why a man whose motive for shooting the President was (as it imaginatively concludes) to assert his personality, to be a somebody in the world and then go down in history, should do this deed and then deny it. Booth, after shooting Lincoln, jumped on the stage for an opportunity to shout ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ Every other assassin or would-be assassin of a U.S. President (all detailed in the report) proclaimed the deed. Not Lee Harvey Oswald. All he said in public was that he didn’t do it. Of what he said to the Dallas police in private the Commission notes that not a word was recorded, but admits he persisted in his denial.
But if this assumption is not made, if the denials of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. are taken, as grown-ups surely should take them, with the head cocked just slightly to one side and a recollection of the number of times these bodies have been caught lying, framing and – in the case of the first – even assassinating; if, in other words, we admit even just the possibility that Oswald (who was certainly not innocent) was a fall-guy, small fry doing a job for one and/or the other, one of the many kept ripe and ready for convenient usage and here employed to put hounds off the scent – then there is no mystery whatever about his biography, the problem disappears.
The effort to blur this in connection with the State Department, whose actual records can less easily claim excuse for non-publication than can those of the two cloak-and-dagger institutions, brings on a veritable orgy of contortions on the part of the Commission. Oswald gets his passport to go to Russia, the first time, in six days, puts on an act at the U.S. Embassy insulting everyone and declaring his loyalty to U.S.S.R. When even this does not get him any job nearer the hub of affairs in Russia then relegation to the premises as a small craftsman, he applies to return with his wife and asks for cash to do so. The resentful Embassy staff at first says no, but then is overruled by superiors at home who stretch the regulations. The Commission says this was because the State Department regarded Oswald as ‘an unstable character whose actions are highly unpredictable,’ and therefore considered it in the best interests of U.S.A. to get him back and out of Russia as soon as possible. Nevertheless, when he applies to the State Department for a new passport to go to Cuba and to the U.S.S.R. again, the same department which has just subsidised him to come out of U.S.S.R. in the U.S. interest, grants it at once, this time in one day! Which, says the Commission, was just routine! The Commission admits that in such cases a ‘look-out card’ is made out, warning that such a man should not get a passport again without due consideration. It even has a witness who remembers making out such a card for Oswald, but it was not in his file and none can remember how it failed to get in (or got out).
A report so packed with facts cannot but include, however fantastic, illuminations of American life. It is by no means devoid of unintentional humour. One is when Oswald, whose letters and diary and other writings are abundantly quoted throughout and who cannot write one single sentence correctly and without misspellings, is solemnly recorded as having been interviewed for a job and assessed as being of ‘outstanding verbal-clerical potential’ (p.640). Another is when, with equal deadpan, we are told (p.361) that he baited his officers by leading ‘them into discussions of foreign affairs about which they often knew less than he did.’ (Heavens above, what must be the level of commissioned rank education in the U.S. marines!) But the whole ‘investigation’ rollicks into farce when it starts on the biography of Jack Ruby, the man who so conveniently shut the mouth of fall-guy Oswald.
‘Many former employers of Ruby,’ we learn, ‘stated that he was a pleasant or unobjectionable employer,’ ‘genuinely interested in their welfare and happiness. In a moment, however, it is explained that he also dominated them, publicly embarrassed them, frequently resorted to violence against them, sometimes attempted to cheat them of their pay, and delayed paying their salaries. He struck one on the head with a blackjack, kicked another – a guitarist – in the groin. His partner was given eight years for sodomy and he himself arrested eight times in a few years for violence and various violations of laws. His activities, the Commission quotes a friend as saying, were ‘shady but legitimate.’ Nevertheless this paragon was on excellent terms with the Dallas police. His ‘personal attachment’ to police affairs is demonstrated by reports that he attended the funeral of at least one policeman killed in action. Ruby regarded several officers as personal friends and others had worked for him. Finally, at least one policeman regularly dated and eventually married, one of the nightclub’s strippers. The Commission concludes that ‘the precise nature of his relationship to members of the Dallas Police Department is not susceptible to conclusive evaluation,’ but it hazards the guess that the Dallas’ police chief’s testimony that a maximum of 50 of his men were acquainted with Ruby is possibly an underestimation. Nobody noticed him about in police headquarters when he shot Oswald, they guess, because probably he was there only about 30 seconds.
From gay to grave: perhaps the most sinister part of the Report is the last chapter. It goes over all the actions and failures of the security organs that were charged with Kennedy’s safety. ‘Errors,’ it characterises them. The remedy? A committee to think up something and meanwhile more of the same. More Secret Service. More money and men for J. Edgar Hoover. More ‘Liaison with local Law Enforcement Agencies’ (i.e., such as the Dallas police). And, we may suppose, if he is bumped off, more enquiries packed with enemies. The warning is clear: like a Sultan surrounded by his Mamelukes, the titular ruler of U.S.A. is to continue to know he must not go too far.
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Ivor Montagu's piece was truncated due, presumably, to the length of the previous items. Here it is in full:
Labour Monthly, November 1964, pp.499-503, & 506-509The Warren Report
By Ivor Montagu
Legend already relates that when Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed to accept the Chairmanship of the Kennedy Enquiry Commission he wept. He had good reason. Just as others had good reason to press him to undertake it. It is interesting to speculate what would have been the reception of its report had the Commission been headed by another of its members – for instance Alan Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency chief whom Kennedy let go after the Bay of Pigs, or McCloy, ex-High Commissioner in Germany, or either of the racist Democratic Senators (from Georgia and Louisiana) or the Goldwaterite Republican. ‘But Brutus is an honourable man.’ Or so said Marc Anthony when he was commenting upon another murder by conspiracy. In that case, Julius Caesar. In this, the truth itself. As it is, because of Brutus, the conspiracy has got off to a fair start. Not so fair as the reader of the British press, with its unanimous hooflick nowadays in response to any ‘moo’ of the Washington sacred cow, might imagine however. The headline in the New York Times on the day following publication (September 29) reads: ‘WARREN FINDINGS SATISFY OFFICIALS IN WEST EUROPE: MUCH OF PUBLIC SCEPTICAL.’ Just so.
The main impact of the report is its voluminousness. It is a real bucket of brainwash. 718 often repetitious pages, a list of 552 witnesses, innumerable staff, a score or so of volumes of testimony promised ultimately – who, after this, would be ungrateful enough to doubt the thoroughness with which the job was done. The old army sweat will easily recognise this technique. It was called he was hauled before the C.O., ‘blinding him with science.’ And the job? To divert attention from the source that stood out as most obviously to be accused.
In the January issue of this magazine, before ever the Commission got down to work, the editor outlined the case, the obvious pointers to C.I.A., F.B.I. and the Dallas police, that the world had seized upon and that these agencies of national and local government had to answer. Cumulatively it was damning. Every one of the counts that he enumerated is confirmed in the report. And much more. The sins of omission, the sins of commission, the facts that arouse suspicion.
It cannot be said that these accused were totally disregarded. The former head of one – Allen Dulles – sat actually on the Commission. The gathering of facts was completely – or in effect completely - entrusted to the second, the F.B.I. That neither was linked to the crimes in any way is concluded from the assurances of their chiefs. The assurance of Mr. McCone. The assurance of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. Both gentlemen, through their subordinates, were kind enough to produce files. The CIA found no blameworthy association of Oswald with the CIA. The FBI found no blameworthy association between him and the FBI. Again and again, when a piece of evidence is cited that points in these directions we are told that the FBI found no confirmation. Exactly. There was no cross examination. When relatives of the bumped-off Lee Harvey Oswald asked to appoint counsel to represent him, they were refused. Half-way through, the Commission got cold feet about this and appointed a respected officer of the Court (who hardly ever bothered to attend), a distinguished Goldwaterite, to advise them whether they were being fair. How one would have liked to hear Lawrence Preston, or even Perry Mason, have a go at this sort of thing.
From the beginning of course, the Commission assumed that U.S. agencies cannot frame, cannot fake evidence, cannot lie. Behind them were Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Hoffa, the Presidential assurances about the U2, Adlai Stevenson’s assurances to the United Nations about the Bay of Pigs. The ink was scarcely blotted on the confessions about the pretended incidents in the Bay of Tonking. But this was its assumption. It remarks firmly that after the releases and pictures and allegations about Lee Harvey Oswald it would have been impossible to ensure a fair trial because of the assumptions any possible jury would make. And then it makes the same assumptions its own whole point of departure in a trial in which his voice was silenced.
Its starting point and its end: not only that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, but that he did it alone. This ‘alone’ was vital. Some people may wonder why, after the careful construction of threads tying Oswald to the U.S.S.R., to Communists, Trotskyists, Cuba, etc., someone changed his mind and the ‘alone’ version, followed by the Commission, was followed instead, from within an hour or two of his arrest. Someone was sensible. These threads were altogether too thin and must snap under any weight. It was too dangerous to have any live accused whose counter-attack might smash the whole thing. After all, the Reichstag Fire Trial was not without its lesson. To prove the Communists guilty, the prosecution revealed evidence that Van der Lubbe could not have done the job alone. As nothing could implicate the Communists, the Nazis pointed at themselves and all the efforts nowadays to whitewash them are bound to fail. How much handier to have bumped off Van der Lubbe on the spot, instead of merely drugging him, and then had a posthumous enquiry commission with Goering as a member and the Gestapo in sole control of collecting evidence.
To reach their preordained conclusion, the Commission had to do some splendid wriggling. The student of the report will notice three outstanding features. First, that when there is any conflict of evidence the Commission threads itself neatly through it, adopting anything consistent with its theory, dismissing as ‘mistaken’ anything that contradicts it. The doctors who first examined Kennedy thought he was shot from the front. Easy, they were mistaken. Some witnesses thought the shots heard were fired from the depository, some from the bridge. Easy, the first were right, the second wrong. Contradictions in time and identity alike are solved by this convenient formula. However, sometimes this wears a little thin. Witnesses who saw Oswald in inconvenient places were mistaken in their recognition – they had seen T.V. pictures of him and this vitiates their evidence. But on the other hand, in their conclusion the Commission claim that nine witnesses saw Oswald kill Tippett or run away after his murder. It becomes a little ingenuous of them to ignore (what they admit later in their text) that the same reservation applies to these. Sometimes they make downright mistakes. One awkward identification of Oswald is dismissed because the ‘Oswald’ seen got drunk, and Lee Harvey, the Commission says, did not drink. But the report later describes an incident in which he did, most thoroughly. (Incidentally, a tantalising reference occurs (p.628) to ‘the English language edition of the Daily Worker,’ allegedly read by Oswald. One would like to know more about this paper.)
On one crucial question let us examine the Commission’s treatment of the question whether it was possible for a man like Oswald to fire the shots and hit the President. This is a clear example of its method. It knows that there is a great question whether one man with such a rifle could accurately have fired the number of shots available in the given time. So first it is anxious to minimise the number of shots. After a lot of weighing and microscopic examination of the bullets (and no explanation of the interval before traces of bullets were looked for on the ground) it concludes that the number must have been three or four and plumps for three. After analysing the evidence of times shots were heard and wounds were seen it comes to the conclusion that if, of the three bullets fired, two hit Kennedy and one hit Governor Connolly the time necessary would have been 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. But this is inconvenient because it comes too close to the time taken for these shots in their tests. So they have the magnificent idea that if one shot missed, and if this was not the middle one but the first or third, the time evidence could be held to give up to 7.1 or even 7.9 seconds. Accordingly in their report they not only state it as a possibility, that one shot hit both Kennedy and Connolly, but conclude it as a fact, loading a headline THE SHOT THAT MISSED, although this is absolutely contrary not only to Connolly’s impression but to the insistent evidence of Connolly’s wife, also in the car, who is determined it was after Kennedy was hit that she heard the shot that hit her husband. The Commission argue that this is perfectly consistent with their conclusion because sound does not travel instantaneously. According to the distance it gives, the sound would have reached Mrs. Connolly in about 1/6th of a second. (This is not one of the figures in the generous avalanche of technical data.)
Next, they take a rifle found in the book depository and arrange for three expert shots to try to shoot three targets arranged at intervals corresponding in angle and distance to the positions of the Presidential car in the probable interval of time. They succeed, but dangerously near the minimum. But why in the tests where the targets not moving? And, above all, why experts? The evidence the Commission itself cites shows that Oswald’s ability was nowhere near the expert’s. ‘Expert’ is the top category of three. Oswald in the marines had two tests. One gave him a bare two marks above the minimum for the second category. The other (later) placed him well down in the third (the lowest). The Commission’s comment on this latter test is characteristic. Without a shred of evidence it suggests that at the time it might have been raining. And yet now two, possibly all three of his shots were hits. Why do the tests with experts? They quote evidence from Oswald’s wife, that he had practised a dry run (loading and unloading) apparently with this rifle. They have no testimony that he ever fired a single practice shot with it. They argue that his task of aiming anew for each shot was made easier because the car was going down a slope of 3 degrees. The height of the building is one of the relevant figures omitted. But the distances are given, the minimum height for the sixth floor is not hard to gauge from the photographs and trigonometry shows this special pleading pretty weak.
The second feature: that the main sustaining evidence against Oswald has been provided by his wife – who, of course, could not have been made to testify against him at all had this been a trial. The evidence of the other parties is thin and contradictory, doubtful recognitions, selected assumptions, behaviour without rhyme or reason. It is entirely the testimony of Marina, the Russian-born wife, that puts flesh and blood on the flimsy skeleton. Marina, who speaks no English, who first declared her disbelief in her husband’s guilt, who was placed, in effect, incommunicado by the F.B.I as soon as the crime was committed and who the Commission triumphantly boasts in its conclusions, has now changed her view. Marina, against whom, as is clear from the report, the U.S. authorities have a clear case whenever they like to press it, for false statement on her immigration form. The Commission are faced with a problem: how to account for Oswald, with a complete absence of any violence on his previous record, having suddenly taken to assassination. So Marina comes to the rescue with a story that he earlier tried to shoot General Walker. How this marksman, capable of accurate shots from an unfamiliar stance in a few seconds against a moving target came then to miss a sitting target, in a location that, according to the report, he had previously prepared and studied, and with all the time in the world at his disposal, is not even discussed by the Committee. It is Marina, too, who helps to whitewash the most damning document admitted by the Committee; the notation of a local F.B.I. officer’s name and address in Oswald’s notebook. Explanation: the F.B.I. made a routine call on the woman with whom Marina was staying, told her Oswald was a suspicious character and left his name and address so she could report to him on his activities. So the woman promptly gave the name and address to Marina who gave it to Oswald who wrote it in his notebook. Really, there seems no limit to the credulity expected of the public by the Commission and the F.B.I.
The third remarkable feature is the amount of space devoted to psychologising Lee Harvey Oswald. Or perhaps it is not remarkable considering the role played in contemporary U.S. society by the psychologist as a sort of sorcerer or medicine man. The Commission is desperately anxious to discover a motive for this man, who never spoke against Kennedy, had no grudge against Kennedy, suddenly deciding on his own to shoot Kennedy. They even, in one place, suggest (while declaring themselves not convinced) that it was because he had just heard his wife running down his sexual ability in the presence of third parties. This mania for finding the simple inexplicable and resorting to ‘psychology,’ reminds of Honor Tracy’s account, in her book on McArthur’s occupation of Japan, of the two G.I.s who were noticed enjoying their doxies in broad daylight on a public hard tennis court in Tokyo, and were remitted to the psychiatric ward for study on why they were doing it. For, on the assumption of the Committee, that he and he alone is the assassin, the case is certainly a problem. The young man who claims he was first attracted to Communism at the age of 16 – and at 20 promptly joins the U.S. marines; who spends his time in the marines – studying the Russian language and Marxism. The flourishing ex-marine - who has money to go to U.S.S.R. The disillusioned anti-communist who writes an exposure of Soviet society on his way home – and on arrival, instead of publishing it, promptly takes out a subscription to the Worker instead. The unemployed man who spends his spare servings on printing propaganda and a visit to Mexico. This intending assassin who draws attention to himself by getting on radio and arrested as a supporter of ‘Fair Play for Cuba,’ and creating a row in Mexico City at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies – and leaves conveniently at his home a photograph of himself with a pistol and rifle holding copies of the Worker and the Militant. All that of course takes some psychologising – if you make the Commission’s assumption. No psychology can explain (so of course the Commission does not attempt to) why a man whose motive for shooting the President was (as it imaginatively concludes) to assert his personality, to be a somebody in the world and then go down in history, should do this deed and then deny it. Booth, after shooting Lincoln, jumped on the stage for an opportunity to shout ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ Every other assassin or would-be assassin of a U.S. President (all detailed in the report) proclaimed the deed. Not Lee Harvey Oswald. All he said in public was that he didn’t do it. Of what he said to the Dallas police in private the Commission notes that not a word was recorded, but admits he persisted in his denial.
But if this assumption is not made, if the denials of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. are taken, as grown-ups surely should take them, with the head cocked just slightly to one side and a recollection of the number of times these bodies have been caught lying, framing and – in the case of the first – even assassinating; if, in other words, we admit even just the possibility that Oswald (who was certainly not innocent) was a fall-guy, small fry doing a job for one and/or the other, one of the many kept ripe and ready for convenient usage and here employed to put hounds off the scent – then there is no mystery whatever about his biography, the problem disappears.
The effort to blur this in connection with the State Department, whose actual records can less easily claim excuse for non-publication than can those of the two cloak-and-dagger institutions, brings on a veritable orgy of contortions on the part of the Commission. Oswald gets his passport to go to Russia, the first time, in six days, puts on an act at the U.S. Embassy insulting everyone and declaring his loyalty to U.S.S.R. When even this does not get him any job nearer the hub of affairs in Russia then relegation to the premises as a small craftsman, he applies to return with his wife and asks for cash to do so. The resentful Embassy staff at first says no, but then is overruled by superiors at home who stretch the regulations. The Commission says this was because the State Department regarded Oswald as ‘an unstable character whose actions are highly unpredictable,’ and therefore considered it in the best interests of U.S.A. to get him back and out of Russia as soon as possible. Nevertheless, when he applies to the State Department for a new passport to go to Cuba and to the U.S.S.R. again, the same department which has just subsidised him to come out of U.S.S.R. in the U.S. interest, grants it at once, this time in one day! Which, says the Commission, was just routine! The Commission admits that in such cases a ‘look-out card’ is made out, warning that such a man should not get a passport again without due consideration. It even has a witness who remembers making out such a card for Oswald, but it was not in his file and none can remember how it failed to get in (or got out).
A report so packed with facts cannot but include, however fantastic, illuminations of American life. It is by no means devoid of unintentional humour. One is when Oswald, whose letters and diary and other writings are abundantly quoted throughout and who cannot write one single sentence correctly and without misspellings, is solemnly recorded as having been interviewed for a job and assessed as being of ‘outstanding verbal-clerical potential’ (p.640). Another is when, with equal deadpan, we are told (p.361) that he baited his officers by leading ‘them into discussions of foreign affairs about which they often knew less than he did.’ (Heavens above, what must be the level of commissioned rank education in the U.S. marines!) But the whole ‘investigation’ rollicks into farce when it starts on the biography of Jack Ruby, the man who so conveniently shut the mouth of fall-guy Oswald.
‘Many former employers of Ruby,’ we learn, ‘stated that he was a pleasant or unobjectionable employer,’ ‘genuinely interested in their welfare and happiness. In a moment, however, it is explained that he also dominated them, publicly embarrassed them, frequently resorted to violence against them, sometimes attempted to cheat them of their pay, and delayed paying their salaries. He struck one on the head with a blackjack, kicked another – a guitarist – in the groin. His partner was given eight years for sodomy and he himself arrested eight times in a few years for violence and various violations of laws. His activities, the Commission quotes a friend as saying, were ‘shady but legitimate.’ Nevertheless this paragon was on excellent terms with the Dallas police. His ‘personal attachment’ to police affairs is demonstrated by reports that he attended the funeral of at least one policeman killed in action. Ruby regarded several officers as personal friends and others had worked for him. Finally, at least one policeman regularly dated and eventually married, one of the nightclub’s strippers. The Commission concludes that ‘the precise nature of his relationship to members of the Dallas Police Department is not susceptible to conclusive evaluation,’ but it hazards the guess that the Dallas’ police chief’s testimony that a maximum of 50 of his men were acquainted with Ruby is possibly an underestimation. Nobody noticed him about in police headquarters when he shot Oswald, they guess, because probably he was there only about 30 seconds.
From gay to grave: perhaps the most sinister part of the Report is the last chapter. It goes over all the actions and failures of the security organs that were charged with Kennedy’s safety. ‘Errors,’ it characterises them. The remedy? A committee to think up something and meanwhile more of the same. More Secret Service. More money and men for J. Edgar Hoover. More ‘Liaison with local Law Enforcement Agencies’ (i.e., such as the Dallas police). And, we may suppose, if he is bumped off, more enquiries packed with enemies. The warning is clear: like a Sultan surrounded by his Mamelukes, the titular ruler of U.S.A. is to continue to know he must not go too far.
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In the thread he initiated on Thomas Buchanan, author of Who Killed Kennedy? (!964), John Simkin wrote on Apr 13 2005, 04:38 PM
I am very interested in the way that Operation Mockingbird dealt with the JFK assassination. Thomas Buchanan appears to have been the first one to get out a book out criticising the lone-gunman theory (May, 1964).The CIA was able to put enough pressure on American companies not to publish the book. However, Buchanan got a contract from the left-wing UK publisher, Secker & Warburg.
Sorry, John, but this is wrong.
Secker and Warburg, the UK publisher of Who Killed Kennedy?, was not a “left-wing” publisher by 1964, if it ever had been. Quite the reverse – it was a CIA “beard,” as Francis Stonor Saunders made clear in “Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War” (London: Granta, 1999). Frederick Warburg was in fact a witting collaborator first with IRD (on the board of the British Society for Cultural Freedom no later than 1952), then with CIA (whose chief Encounter panjandrums referred to Warburg as one of “The Cousins,” the other so described being Malcolm Muggeridge). Stonor Saunders offers this touching portrait of the edifying business of dishing out the tax-payer’s dosh:
“Later the IRD paid the money into a private account at publishers Secker and Warburg, and Warburg would then arrange for a cheque for the same amount to be made out to the British Society for Cultural Freedom, of which he was treasurer. The British Society, by now no more than a front for IRD’s cash-flow to Encounter, then made over the same amount to the magazine. In intelligence phraseology, this kind of funding mechanism was known as a ‘triple pass’” (Ibid., p.177).
Thus Thomas Buchanan’s Who Killed Kennedy? was published, in the UK, by a publisher at the very heart of the Anglo-American spook politico-cultural nexus.
Nor is this the only evidence of CIA-backing for Buchanan’s book.
Stonor Saunders’ book is fascinating and I warmly commend it, not least on the subject of CIA control of Hollywood. But there are problems. One for the moment.
In order to earn the status of mainstream dissident – and thus garner favourable reviews from The Guardian, and other nominally left-wing organs – Saunders must perforce exercise a highly selective eye. Thus there is nothing in her book on a remarkable review of Buchanan’s “Who Killed Kennedy?” by that habitual CIA gofer, Goronwy Rees. Here is the review in full:
Encounter, June 1964, pp. 73-74, 76 & 78Books & Writers: Whodunnit
By Goronwy Rees
Who Killed Kennedy? By Thomas G. Buchanan. Secker and Warburg, 18s.
For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the office of the President has a numinous quality which is reflected upon all its occupants. The President is hedged by a kind of divinity which has long ceased to surround a king. Thus, for Americans, there is something sacrilegious in the murder of a President, which others cannot wholly understand, however much they may sympathise. It is a desecration of the Union’s hallowed ground and for an American it is almost inconceivable that this could be anything except the work of a diseased and deranged personality. To think otherwise, one would have to assume that there are evil men who for their own ends would plot and conspire to violate the most sacred altars of the Republic, and, unless of course such men were Communists, this is something most Americans cannot bring themselves to accept.
Mr. Buchanan, himself an American, has now written a book which will outrage all such beliefs, or superstitions, and at the same time give profound offence to many who believe themselves to be friends of the United States. Who Killed Kennedy? is in many ways an unpleasant book. It is marred by that kind of sour malice, of innuendo and Schadenfreude, to which left-wingers (Mr. Buchanan is a recent ex-Communist) are so often unfortunately prone; even the shade of Jefferson Davis does not escape a perfectly irrelevant sneer. It is also marred by errors of historical interpretation which make one doubt Mr. Buchanan’s credentials as a commentator on the contemporary American scene. If he can be so wrong about the historical situation which led to the assassination of Lincoln, about which after all one knows a great deal, if still not everything, why should we trust his account of the forces which led to the assassination of Kennedy, about which we as yet know very little?
Nevertheless, it would be a pity if its faults denied Mr. Buchanan’s book the attention it deserves. Who Killed Kennedy? asks a serious question which demands a serious answer; and if no better answers are given than those we have already received from Dallas, one might reasonably conclude, as Mr. Buchanan does, that the United States may be threatened by even greater disasters than the murder of a President.
Who Killed Kennedy? has something of the manner, the form, and the fascination of an extremely high class detective story. It begins with a study of the assassination of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley; it is as if Mr. Buchanan were examining the history of some well-ordered and apparently prosperous family whose past has dark secrets, some taint of blood, which one day will once again erupt into violence.
Mr. Buchanan has no difficulty in showing that the assassins of the three Presidents were in no ordinary, or medical, or legal sense mad; in the case of the two of them who were brought to trial, the courts held that they were responsible for their acts. He also shows that they all had definite political motives, however eccentric or mistaken; that John Wilkes Booth certainly was the centre of a widespread plot, even though we still do not quite understand all its ramifications; that Guiteau, who murdered Garfield, thought he was acting on behalf of a defeated political faction; that McKinley’s assassin, Czolgosz, was an anarchist who believed he was acting in the interest both of his own cause and of the people of the United States: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good working people.”
What Buchanan is trying to establish is that there is a pattern of Presidential assassination in the United States and that this pattern does not accord with the popular belief that the murder of a President is necessarily the irrational act of a lonely and isolated individual who is diseased or deranged in mind. He wished to show this in particular because the case against Lee Harvey Oswald is precisely that he was such an individual, who acted for no none motive; the original charge that he was a Communist agent was hastily dropped, both because of its inherent improbability and because it would have been extremely difficult to reconcile it with the details of Oswald’s extraordinarily tortuous and ambiguous career. And indeed nothing that is known about Oswald lends support to the theory that he was a totally isolated individual capable of a wholly irrational act; any more than anything that is known about Ruby lends support to the theory that he was a patriotic and emotional American capable of shooting Oswald to spare Mrs. Kennedy further suffering.
The second act of Mr. Buchanan’s whodunnit consists of a detailed analysis of the circumstances of President Kennedy’s murder, so far as these are known from official statements and press reports. This is the best part of the book; and it should be noted that his criticisms of the official theory of the murder coincide with those of others, who may be believed to be less prejudiced than Mr. Buchanan but have found the same difficulty in accepting the baffling improbabilities of the official version. That version is that Oswald and Oswald alone was responsible for the crime and that he shot the President from a room on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on the corner of Houston Street in Dallas.
Unfortunately, Oswald once again does not conform to the character of the assassin required by the official theory. It requires that, within the space of 5½ seconds, using telescopic sights, he should have directed three accurate shots from a rifle which had to be reloaded after each shot, at a range of 100 yards at a target moving at a speed of ten miles an hour. Such a feat would challenge the skill of the greatest marksman in the world. But Oswald’s record as a marine shows that he was a poor, at best a mediocre shot, and I agree with Mr. Buchanan that even the most intensive training and instruction (which would imply that he had accomplices) could not have transformed him into the superlative marksman who is held to have shot the President.
There is the further difficulty that the distinguished surgeons who operated on the President stated that the bullet which killed the President entered his throat from the front. The assassin on Houston Street, of course, shot the President from the back. The surgeons’ statement was later retracted and we are asked to believe that they made a mistake in the excitement and confusion.
But indeed the series of official statements issued in support of the case against Oswald present such bewildering inconsistencies and contradictions that they defy even the most willing suspension of disbelief. As Mr. Buchanan says, the only constant factor in them was the repeated assertion that Oswald alone was guilty, and as facts appeared which seemed to make this improbable if not impossible, the official version, but not its underlying premise, was hurriedly altered to accommodate them. The official case is surrounded by such a cloud of improbabilities and coincidences (as of the second Carcano rifle which, before the murder, a gunsmith fitted with telescopic sights to the order of an Oswald who was not Lee Harvey Oswald) that it places an almost intolerable strain on one’s credulity. Mr. Buchanan concludes his examination of the police case by leaving the verdict to the reader; but he leaves no doubt of his own conclusion that Oswald alone did not and could not possibly have assassinated the President.
This brings him to the third act of his drama. For if Oswald was not alone guilty, who else was implicated and how was the crime committed? In answering this question Mr. Buchanan is necessarily driven far into the realm of speculation, and most of his readers, unless they share his own prejudices, will be inclined to dismiss his conclusions as at best non proven and at worst as the product of a fervent and malevolent imagination.
His account of the assassination involves the existence of two assassins, one of whom shot the President from the front from the railway tracks over the underpass which the President’s car was approaching (it is significant that when the first shot was fired the onlookers instinctively thought it had come from the direction of the underpass), while the other, with the assistance of Oswald, shot him from behind from the book depository on Houston Street. It involves the complicity of the Dallas police, who left the underpass unguarded and allowed Oswald to leave the book depository before, precisely one minute later, issuing an order for his arrest; and also of the unfortunate policeman Tippit, who was shot by Oswald after the assassination. It involves the existence of a widespread plot, in which Oswald was cast as the scapegoat and fall guy, and Tippit for that of his executioner, who would shoot him down, “while attempting to escape.” (It is inexplicable that Tippit was alone in his radio car in the neighbourhood of Oswald’s rooming-house, after a general call had been sent out for his arrest, though Oswald’s address was known to the police.) But Oswald shot first, and by remaining alive became, for two days, an intolerable embarrassment to the conspirators until, with otherwise inexplicable negligence, the police created the opportunity for the professional gangster Ruby to shoot Oswald before the eyes of the astonished world.
But who were the instigators of the plot? Mr. Buchanan accuses the chiefs of the Texan oil industry, who through the “Dallas Citizens’ Council” control Dallas and its police as effectively as any robber baron ever ruled a medieval community, and in particular one of them, Mr. X, a man of fabulous wealth and a colossal gambler who was willing to take all the immense risks involved in the conspiracy; Mr. Buchanan’s description of him leaves little doubt whom precisely he has in mind.
But what were his motives and what had he to gain? His motives were political; to remove President Kennedy because, firstly, his policy of détente with the U.S.S.R. and consequently of disarmament was a threat to the Texas oil industry’s huge investment in the industrial expansion which had taken place in Texas since the war, and, secondly, because he favoured a reduction in the 25% tax concession which makes oil the most privileged industry in the United States. Equally the motive was to replace Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, a Texan, sympathetic to the oil industry and as a favourite of reactionary Texans less inclined than Kennedy to make the concessions which a détente with the U.S.S.R. would require.
Stated so briefly, Mr. Buchanan’s charges have an air of fantasy; we are in the world of the Manchurian Candidate, only the cops and robbers have changed sides. But they also have a basis of reality. He supports them with an account of the known connection between politics, big business and organized crime in America, based on the findings of the Kefauver Senate Committee, and with an analysis of the structure and organisation of the Texas oil industry, and the psychology and political chauvinism of its masters, which does not differ in essentials (though with the note of admiration missing) from what one may read in such respectable writers as Mr. John Bainbridge or Miss Edna Ferber. Mr. X is Giant.
And indeed in this lies the sting and the venom of his book. Mr. Buchanan uses the murder of the President to hold up a mirror to America which reflects such a Caliban image of brutishness and corruption that her enemies can only view it with glee and her friends with dismay. It acquires force simply because the analysis of the President’s murder is sufficiently searching and persuasive almost to convince one that this explanation of it must be true; at the very least one is inclined to say that it covers what appear to be known facts better than the official explanation. Mr. X is a more convincing figure than Oswald as a lone assassin or Ruby as a patriot.
What is worse is that the seeds which Mr. Buchanan has sown will find fertile ground to fall on, if not in America, in the rest of the world, where millions of men and women who are only too glad to think the worst of the United States, whether she is their friend or their enemy. It is fortunate, therefore, that, even if Mr. Buchanan were right in his account of the particular elements in American life which he has chosen to emphasise for the purposes of his book, there are also other elements in it which he chooses to ignore though in the long run they have invariably proved the stronger.
In the President’s Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy, presided over by Mr. Earl Warren, ex-Governor of California, and Chief Justice of the United States, America has an instrument which can either put an end to the suspicion and charges raised by Mr. Buchanan, and not by him alone, or ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. No-one who is familiar with the career or the reputation of Mr. Warren can have any doubt of his integrity or his courage or his devotion to the principles to which the United States is dedicated; equally, one cannot doubt that Mr. Robert Kennedy will use to their fullest extent his powers as the Cabinet minister responsible for the F.B.I. to ensure that the Commission will have all the technical assistance it requires in its investigation. (Though Mr. Buchanan, no doubt, would ask us to remember that it was only Texas which gave the Democratic Party its victory in the last Presidential election.)
It must be said, however, that unless the Commission examines in closest detail Mr. Buchanan’s criticisms of the official case against Lee Harvey Oswald, there will be many outside America who will fail to be convinced that it has discharged its task adequately. In his Preface Mr. Buchanan states that, at the request of a staff member, his book has been filed in Washington with the President’s Commission. One may expect therefore that it will receive from the Commission the scrupulous and objective examination it deserves, and until the Commission has reported it would perhaps be an act of friendship to suspend the doubts which the question Who Killed Kennedy? must arouse in anyone who has seriously studied the case.
There is however one fascinating corollary to the hypothesis Mr. Buchanan has formed about the President’s murder, and indeed it might be used as the principle of its verification. If Mr. Buchanan is, in general terms, correct, it should follow as the night the day that Ruby will never live to go to the electric chair. He has appealed against his sentence, and the processes of American law are protracted; in the meantime he constitutes precisely the same dangers to the conspirators, if there was a conspiracy, as Oswald did before Ruby shot him. One must hope that Ruby is given better protection than the Dallas police gave Oswald.
The principle underpinning the CIA’s decision to commission and run such a review isn’t hard to discern: Anybody but the Agency killed Kennedy.
In assessing Buchanan’s bona fides, it would be useful to see what French Communists wrote about the Elm Street coup. Alas, my French is negligible, so the best I can offer is the work of British Communist contemporaries. Both pieces are taken from Labour Monthly, the product, slightly confusingly, of the British Communist Party. The first, in chronological order, is Palme Dutt’s January 1964 piece, “Notes of the Month: After Kennedy,” Vol. XLVI, No. 1, pp.1-15:
Labour Monthly, January 1964, pp. 1-15;Notes of the Month: After Kennedy
Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long
Shakespeare
By R. Palme Dutt
December 10, 1963
President Kennedy’s murder has thrown a sudden fierce light on the realities of the world in which we live, beneath all the smooth, polite façade of ‘Western civilization.’ This murder was a political act. Its consequences may reach far. The murder of an Archduke in Sarajevo at one end of Europe and the murder of the silver-tongued orator of socialism, Juares, at the other, inaugurated the first world war. The murders of Liebknecht and of Rosa Luxembourg immediately after the first world war, and of Rathenau in the succeeding years, presaged the downward slide of the Weimar Republic into Nazism. The murders of the last independent French Foreign Minister Barthou and King Alexander of Jugoslavia heralded the appeasement of Nazism. What will prove the sequel to Kennedy’s murder? It is no wonder that concern and anxiety is shared in many countries among wide circles of the people far beyond those sharing his political outlook.
Karl Marx’s Address to President Johnson
After the murder of President Abraham Lincoln the First International or International Working Men’s Association (the centenary whose foundation we honour this year) transmitted an ‘Address’ written by Karl Marx, and signed by Marx and all his associates of the General Council, to Lincoln’s successor, President Johnson, whom as Vice-President the assassin had also sought to kill, but who had escaped and survived to find himself suddenly, not by his own wish or solicitation, President Johnson. In his Address Karl Marx and his fellow signatories declared:
It is not our part to call words of sorrow and horror, while the heart of two worlds heaves with emotion. Even the sycophants who, year after year and day by day, stuck to their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln and the great republic he headed stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling, and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers upon his open grave…Such indeed was the modesty of this great and good man that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr…
Yours, Sir, has become the tremendous task to uproot by the law which had been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. A profound sense of your great mission will save you from any compromise with stern duties. You will never forget that to initiate the new era of the emancipation of labour the American people devolved the responsibility of leadership upon two men of labour – the one Abraham Lincoln, the other Andrew Johnson.
Such were the words Marx chose to address the President of the United States a century ago.
From Lincoln to Kennedy
Kennedy was no Lincoln. Nevertheless it is true that the same evil upas tree of racial slavery, which was and remains the foundation of American ‘free’ institutions and of American wealth, just as of all Western ‘freedom’ and Western wealth, struck down Lincoln a century ago and was one of the key factors in striking down Kennedy today. Lincoln was the leader of ascendant American capitalism, when it was still progressive; and his leadership of the fight of the Republican North against the slave owners of the South made it possible for this Head of State of the already powerful American capitalism to be acclaimed by Marx as a ‘hero’ honoured by the international working class. Yet Lincoln was at the same time the head of what Marx characterised, in his letter to Engels of September 10, 1862, as ‘a bourgeois republic where fraud has so long reigned supreme,’ or again, in his letter to Engels on September 7, 1864, as ‘the model country of the democratic swindle.’ This merciless exposure, in informal private correspondence, of the real character of United States capitalism and capitalist democracy did not prevent Marx from recognising at the same time the historic significance of the role of its President in a given national and international situation, and from giving unreserved public expression to that recognition. It is possible that even today Marxists can learn something from this example of Marx, that it is not enough simply to classify a given political figure by his class affiliation and thereby regard the issue as closed when the need is to judge correctly his political significance in a given historical situation.
Dilemma of United States Policy
Certainly Kennedy belonged to a very different era from that of Lincoln. Kennedy was the representative, no longer of ascendant American capitalism, but of American capitalism in extreme decay, in the culminating stages of monopolist decline: on the one hand, extending its tentacles over the entire world; aggressive, ruthless and brutal; on the other hand, desperate and fearful before the advance of the new world of socialism and national liberation. The lords of American capital are finding themselves compelled to learn today, as the lords of the British Empire had to learn yesterday, that they are no longer all-powerful rulers of the world, capable of dictating their will in any quarter of the globe where they chose to impose it. They have to reckon with a new world situation in which there is equality of forces on either side. They have to reckon with a new strategic situation in which the superiority of ‘Western civilisation’ can no longer be proved by the superiority of the gatling gun over bows and arrows; while the alternative replacement dream, which had currency in the years after the second world war, of atomic monopoly or superiority to maintain the old supremacy has now also vanished. The have to reckon with a new world economic situation where the previous incontestable scientific and technological superiority of capitalism over older systems has now been successfully challenged in turn by the increasingly manifest superiority of the newer economic system of socialism. All this presents a new type of problem for the American policy makers, unguessed even in the days of the foundation of NATO.
Schizophrenia
From this situation follows the peculiar schizophrenia, the switchback somersaults of contradictions, the open clash of conflicting trends also on the highest levels, the ferocious battles in the Senate Committees or between rival strategic services, the ceaseless ‘agonising reappraisals’ of American policy in the current period. All the previous dreams of ‘the American century’; the spate of bombastic volumes of the Ludwell Denny type proclaiming the inevitability of the American world empire (‘What chance has Britain against America? Or what chance has the world?); the Colliers Magazine ‘Third World War’ Specials in five million copies in 1951 depicting on the cover the American G.I. bestriding Moscow, and proclaiming the theme ‘Russia’s Defeat and Occupation 1952-1960’ – all these have had to vanish into the discard so completely that younger people today, who know nothing of them, would find it difficult to believe that such was the current coinage of the Western world only a dozen years ago, when Priestley also contributed a star article to the Colliers’ ‘Third World War’ Special, describing with imaginative gusto the American occupation of Moscow, or Bertrand Russell, who has since to his honour abundantly redeemed his temporary loss of direction at that time, was advocating a preventative atomic war on the Soviet Union.
Toynbee on the American Counter-Revolution
But once these Fulton dreams of a Truman and a Churchill, of a Bevin and an Attlee, these dreams of the ‘policy of strength,’ of invincible Western power, of nuclear superiority, of triumphant ‘showdown’ with the Soviet Union to ‘roll back the frontiers of Communism,’ have vanished, what is to take their place? There is the problem, there is still the unresolved dilemma of American policy today. All the instincts of the American lords of capital, accustomed to bludgeon and bulldose their way triumphantly against all lesser breeds either within the United States or on the American Continent or abroad, and above all against any whom they might choose to describe as ‘Reds,’ revolt against the idea of negotiating on a basis of equality with the Soviet Union, with Communists. ‘Treason.’ ‘Twenty years of treason.’ They took sixteen years even to recognise the Soviet Union. After fifteen years they have not even yet recognised the Chinese People’s Republic. The banner of revolution raised in the American War of Independence nearly two centuries ago has turned to the opposite. As the historian Arnold Toynbee, until recently the favoured idol in the United States with his mystical cyclical theories cherished by reaction as the doom of any conception of human progress, has noted in his latest lectures published this year:
America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defence of vested interests.
(Arnold J. Toynbee, America and the World Revolution, 1963.)
‘Paralysis of Power’
But while all the instincts of American reaction continue more violent and aggressive than ever, the more Communism advances in the world, prudence and hard facts and realism compel the recognition of the possible necessity of alternative courses. Slowly, hesitantly, doubtfully, amid the snarls of reaction, the U.S.-Soviet dialogue begins. George Kennan, who initially in the first years after the war (in the famous semi-official article signed by ‘X’) was one of the authors of the cold war theory, describing how its practice would inevitably lead to the crumbling and disintegration of the Soviet Union, has in the subsequent period, notably in the famous Reith lectures of 1958, been among the foremost to recognise the changed facts and the consequent necessity for a change in policy. In his most recent study ‘The Paralysis of American Power’ he has posed the question as ‘the heart of the problem’ of American policy:
Do we want to destroy or negotiate with Communist nations?
And again:
Do we want political or military solutions for the Cold War?
There indeed is ‘the heart of the problem’ of American policy today. And it is this context that needs to be seen the significance equally of the transitional role of Kennedy and of the murder of Kennedy.
Passing of the Eisenhower Era
When President Eisenhower went to the first Summit Conference in 1955, it was not by any means out of his own wishes or with any hope of the prospect that he went. It was the compulsion of world conditions and the climate of world opinion that sent him there. He has recorded in his recently published Memoirs The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956, how initially Anthony Eden, when he was Foreign Secretary under Churchill, was opposed to the idea, but that after April 5, 1955, when he became Prime Minister,
For some reason, whether because of political exigencies of his new position or the turn of events in the world, Anthony now reversed his former opposition.
Eisenhower reveals that he eventually fell into line, ‘not wishing to appear senselessly stubborn.’ So the 1955 opportunity came and went, with nothing visible to show save for the theatrical gesture of the ‘Open Skies’ proposal of Eisenhower. Odd, incidentally, how, whenever it comes to proposals at the conference table, the American negotiators have always tended to harp on their central strategic aim of inspection of the Soviet Union. The U2 was another highly unorthodox kind of ‘Open Skies’ inspection. The test ban negotiations were bogged down for years on the issue of inspection. And now, when discussions have been opened on the possible next steps for disarmament, it appears that the American proposals are concentrated on the stationing of inspection teams in the Soviet Union. This nagging desire, with the calculations behind the desire, has become too obvious even to the most unobservant – as Blackett has long ago shown.
Eisenhower’s Unhappy End
1955 passed into the dead record. From the point of view of British Toryism the election had been won, and the urgency of the need was over.
The Devil was sick;
The Devil a Summiteer would be.
The Devil was well;
The Devil a Summiteer was he.
But then came the 1959 election; and the need became urgent again. This time the level of world pressure had risen far higher. Once again the reluctant Eisenhower was brought to the mountain. This time the most extraordinary measures had to be taken by the Central Intelligence Agency and the strategic services to wreck the Summit. The U2 was sent out on its reckless illegal raiding mission over the heart of the Soviet Union at a height which was believed to be beyond the reach of any known rocket, while in case of accident the pilot was equipped, not only with his roubles and revolver, but also his suicide instructions and kit. All went wrong. The deadly accuracy of Soviet rocketry capable of bringing down a fly at 80,000 feet was demonstrated to the world, while the pilot survived to tell the tale of how the massive bribe of dollars had led him to this shameful role. The unhappy Eisenhower was compelled, first to deny knowledge, then to claim a supposed accidental error of flight direction (before it was known that the pilot had survived to tell the tale); then to admit publicly that he, the American President, had lied, and confess to full guilty knowledge beforehand; finally to try to bluster it out and claim the sacred right of American aggression to violate sovereignty any where in the world. So Eisenhower passed out in a blaze of ignominy. The tragedy was duly repeated as farce when his colleague of the abortive Summit of 1960, Macmillan, ended in his turn with the ridiculous ignominy of finding the dignity of his name of a would-be grand signeur inextricably linked for all future history with the final episode of a Profumo and a Keeler attached like a tin can to his tail.
Transition to Kennedy
Kennedy was elected President in 1960 – by an extremely narrow majority against the notorious Red-baiter Nixon – on the basis of a very vehement electoral campaign of denunciation of the entire record of Eisenhower as a record of slackness and sloth. This cut both ways. Eisenhower had himself been originally returned in 1952 on a basis of a vehement electoral denunciation of the Democratic President Truman and his Secretary of State Acheson for their role in the Korean War and a solemn pledge to end the Korean War and bring peace in Korea. He kept that pledge and agreed to the Korean Armistice in 1953. It is one of the more engaging sidelights on American electoral tactics, and also one of the permanent indications of the deep true feelings of the masses of the American people beneath all the noisy official chauvinist bluster on the surface, that any promise of peace from a leading contender can be regarded as a sure electoral winner. President Wilson won the 1916 election on the unanswerable slogan ‘He Kept Us Out of War,’ only to enter the war as soon as the election was safely over, in the spring of 1917. The denunciation of Eisenhower by Kennedy included denunciation of the ‘weakness’ of Eisenhower on Cuba and the promise of vigorous action against the Castro regime in Cuba. That was one side of the medal. But it was not the whole picture.
Two Sides of Kennedy
The historic significance of the role of President Kennedy was that he embodied in his own person both the two conflicting trends in American policy today. On the one hand, he was a most active champion of the cold war. He raised arms expenditure again and again to the most staggering record peacetime height. He sanctioned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the first year of his office. Infuriated by the fiasco of that adventure, he prepared in the following year to launch the most massive large-scale official assault and invasion of Cuba, and was only foiled by the Soviet missiles. He conducted the dirtiest war of modern times in South Vietnam. At home, fearful of the power of the Southern Democrats controlling the levers of his machine, he faltered and fumbled before the imperative issue of Civil Rights, until his hand was forced, and let the flames of lawless racial violence rise to such heights as found expression in the murder of tiny Negro children in the open streets while the majesty of American law and power appeared palsied and impotent. The sequel was rapid. The bullet that had shot the Negro children with impunity shot Kennedy as the next victim. Just as the murder of Lumumba prepared the murder of Hammarskjold, so the murder of the Negro children prepared the murder of Kennedy. But it was not for the crimes of the cold war, or the dark record over Cuba and South Vietnam, or for the faltering over Civil Rights, that Kennedy was shot. It was only when he appeared to be moving in the direction of East-West negotiations and possible accommodation, when he set up the joint private exchange line with Premier Khrushchev, when he began to press forward the bill of Civil Rights, that he became the universal target of hatred and calumny by American reaction on a scale unparalleled since Roosevelt after Yalta. The death shot was the sequel.
Kennedy and Peace
For the other side of Kennedy’s restless, enquiring, action-seeking outlook and personality, that side which recognised with sober seriousness the deadly hazards of cold war recklessness and nuclear strategy, and which began to grope, however hesitantly, for an alternative, that side was also present from the outset, and visibly grew as his experience grew, as his contacts with Soviet representatives extended, as he grew with the responsibilities of the Presidency. Already in his election year in 1960 Senator Kennedy had called the ‘liberation’ policy of Dulles and Eisenhower ‘a snare and a delusion,’ and had declared that the United States ‘had neither the intention nor the capacity to liberate Eastern Europe’ (see J. Crown and G. Penty, Kennedy in Power, New York, 1961). True, in his platform speeches (reprinted in the collection under his name entitled To Turn the Tide by Harper and Brothers, 1962) he could still hand out the old threadbare rhetoric about the ‘eternal struggle of liberty against tyranny,’ dating it on one occasion from ‘500 years before the birth of Christ,’ on another occasion as ‘since the beginning of history,’ and on another occasion (all in the same book) as ‘since the end of the second world war.’ But the more the problems gathered around him, the more the real alternatives shattered the tinsel of rhetorical platitudes, and especially after the Caribbean crisis of the autumn of 1962, with the experience of the Soviet-American confrontation and final co-operation for peace in that grave test, the new positive note of insistence on the necessity of negotiation began to sound increasingly in all his major utterances.
‘Re-Examine Our Attitude to Peace’
On June 10, 1963, came the famous speech, appealing to Americans to re-examine their whole attitude to the Soviet Union and to the cold war – the speech which was the first public expression of the approach to a major new phase in American policy, and which was at the same time the starting point of the developments that culminated for Kennedy on November 22. He rejected the conception of a ‘Pax American’ based on the ‘policy of strength’:
What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax American enforced on the world by American weapons of war.
In common with the 1960 Statement of the 81 Communist Parties he recognised two basic propositions of the present epoch. First, that the latest development of nuclear weapons had brought a qualitative change to the question of a new world war:
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces.
Second, that a third world war should not be regarded as fatalistically inevitable:
Let us re-examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed. We must not accept that viewpoint.
On this basis, while emphasising the fundamental difference of social system and outlook of the United States and the Soviet Union as not to be surrendered by either side, he urged the aim and possibility of ‘attainable peace’ through successive limited concrete agreements corresponding to the interests of both sides:
I am not referring to the absolute infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics still dream. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace – based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a more gradual evolution in human institutions – on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.
‘Re-Examine the Cold War’
Confronting directly the argument of opponents that the character of the Soviet Union and of Communism ruled out the possibility of any stable agreements or peace, he launched out in a series of appeals to the American public to re-think these questions and prepare for the prospect of a reversal of the traditional attitudes of the past eighteen years and a new era of U.S.-Soviet relations:
History teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising shifts in the relations between nations and neighbours…
Let us re-examine our attitudes towards the Soviet Union…Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Russians suffered in the course of the second world war…
Let us re-examine our attitude towards the cold war…Our conflicts, to be sure, are real. Our concepts of the world are different. No service is performed by failing to make clear our disagreements…but…we need a much better weapon than the H-bomb – a weapon better than ballistic missiles or nuclear submarines – and that better weapon is peaceful co-operation.
However much the innovating content of this June 10 speech might have been wrapped up in an accompaniment of conventional phrases and sentiments from the cold war armoury to reassure suspicious hearers, the unmistakable signpost pointing towards a major shift in U.S.-Soviet relations and possible closer co-operation was noted by diplomats all over the world, and not least by all the reactionaries and militarists of the United States and West Germany, who already began to sound the alarm.
‘A New Yalta’
Only the most naïve would imagine that an eloquent statement of principles is the same as action. Within a fortnight of that June 10 speech Kennedy was basking in the applause of the neo-Nazi hearers in West Berlin as he denounced Communism and proclaimed himself ‘a Berliner.’ Nevertheless, despite all the obvious contradictions and clashes, through all the fluctuating zig zags, the major line indicated in that June 10 speech continued to be pursued. By the end of July the Partial Test Ban Treaty was initialled, with the official signing by the beginning of August, and was universally recognised as opening a new diplomatic perspective. The anger and alarm of all the embattled hosts of reaction and militarism in the United States and West Germany now became open and unconcealed, all the more as rumours spread (denied by Kennedy on October 31) that the United States was preparing to withdraw some of its occupation troops from West Germany. Talk of a ‘new Yalta’ now began to be heard. Thus in the West German Welt am Sonntag of August 18 the influential economist, reputed close to Erhard, Professor Ropke, wrote:
Kennedy, being progressive, suffers from chronic distortion of sight in face of communist danger. Notwithstanding all the assurances he has given the Germans, he is gravely jeopardising the German glacis by pursuing a policy of one-sided concessions inaugurated by his emissary Harriman, one of the chief architects of the capitulation at Yalta. What de Gaulle justifiably fears is…a decision on Europe made by the Harrimans, the Kennedys and Macmillans – in a word, a new Yalta, whose first stage would be the recognition of the communist rape of territory and of peoples that Yalta made possible, and the second stage the systematic moral and political subversion of what remains of free Europe.
It is rich indeed when the heirs of Hitler can publicly rebuke the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union for daring to draw up the Crimea Agreement (drawn up at Yalta) pledging Three Power co-operation for the destruction of German militarism, Nazism, and fascism.
The ‘Final Solution’
But there is no mistaking the significance of this language which now became current in all the powerful right-wing cold war circles in the United States and West Germany during the autumn of 1963. In these circles ‘Yalta’ represents the ultimate term of abuse, because it was the expression of Western-Soviet unity for the destruction of Nazism and militarism. All the venom and hatred which was piled up against Roosevelt after Yalta from the wealthy monopolists and jackals of reaction began to be accumulated against Kennedy as the target. This menacing trend was accentuated by the internal situation in the United States. Just as the fury of the big vested interests against Roosevelt was intensified by his home measures of the ‘New Deal’ union recognition and war-time taxation (although all these measures were in reality indispensable prescriptions to seek to save the sick American capitalism), so the fury of reaction against Kennedy was intensified as he endeavoured to press forward with even the minimum measure of the Civil Rights bill. On November 11 the Economist recorded from Washington increasing
suspicion of the President’s contacts with the Russians. The report that he and Mr. Khrushchev have exchanged forty or so letters in the past year has become a matter for reproach as well as suspicion.
Kennedy, never lacking in courage, went to beard the beast of American right-wing reaction in its den in Dallas. There on November 22 he was shot dead. Whoever shot those three bullets with such unerring accuracy from a distant window at a moving target, with each bullet a bull’s eye, was certainly a skilled marksman. Kennedy’s death was sudden and rapid, unlike the painful and lingering road to death of Roosevelt during the two months after Yalta. The stock exchange, as soon as it re-opened after the assassination, soared to record heights.
Presidential Murders as a Political System
For a century the murder of the President from time to time has been an unwritten article of the American Constitution. Commentators have observed that out of thirty-two Presidents during the past century four have been assassinated (leaving out the score unsuccessful attempts on others), and that one in eight chances of sudden death might appear a somewhat high casualty rate. But they have either remarked on this as a curious phenomenon, or deduced from it a strain of violence in the American Way of Life. What they have not observed is the constitutional significance of this practice. Under the United States Constitution the President, once he is installed in office for his term of four years (which in practice in the modern period has tended to become a term of eight years), exercises supreme executive power at will, and cannot be removed by any device in the Constitution. He cannot be forced to resign by a vote of Congress. He cannot be impeached. If a President develops progressive tendencies, and begins to enter on courses of action displeasing to the great propertied interests which are the real rulers of America, there is no legal or constitutional way of removing him, there is no way of getting rid of him save by physical elimination. The record of the kingdom of the Carnegies and Rockefellers has shown no scruples in that respect, either within the United States or through the actions of the Marines or the C.I.A. or other agencies in Latin America or other countries.
A Roll of Dead Presidents
Lincoln and Kennedy were shot dead in public. Others also from the moment of causing displeasure to the ruling interests vanished rapidly from the scene. Woodrow Wilson, aflame with the ideal of the League of Nations as a vision of international peace, incurred the obstructive hatred of the Elders of the Senate, who understood very well that American monopoly capitalism could not yet dominate an international organisation of this type and would therefore be stronger outside. Buoyantly Wilson entered on a speaking tour to convert the nation with his unrivalled prestige and popularity. On the tour he was suddenly struck down with physical collapse from which he never recovered; and he died an embittered man. Roosevelt returned from Yalta with its triumphant vision of American-Soviet co-operation for peace and popular advance in the post-war world, and incurred such venomous hatred from American reaction as has never been equalled. Within two months he was dead. He was replaced by the miserable pigmy Truman to inaugurate the cold war.
A C.I.A. Job?
The facts of the Dallas murder may become later more fully known. Or, as is more likely, they may remain forever buried. Universal suspicion has certainly been aroused in all countries by the peculiar circumstances and the still more peculiar actions and successive statements of the authorities both before and after. The obvious tale of ‘a Communist’ was too crude to take in anyone anywhere – especially as it was evident to all that the blow was a blow precisely against the aims most ardently supported by Communists and the left, the aims of peaceful co-existence, American-Soviet co-operation and democratic rights, which Kennedy was accused by the right of helping. The old legal maxim in a case of murder, cui bono – for whose benefit? – still has its value for sniffing out the guilty party. It is natural therefore that most commentators have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas. That may be but the trail, if followed up seriously, seems to reach wider. Any speculation at present can only be in the air, since the essential facts are still hidden. But on the face of it this highly organised coup (even to the provision of a ‘fall guy’ Van der Lubbe and rapid killing of the fall guy while manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his talking), with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a C.I.A. job.
Can the Rat be Deodorised?
After all, the C.I.A. had just arrived fresh from bumping off Diem earlier in the same month. The Kennedy job was certainly a larger order to undertake; but the operation was manifestly organised with the customary elaborate attention to detail. Even the background information offered with regard to the Van der Lubbe presented a highly peculiar story. From the Marines; a supposed ‘defector’ to the Soviet Union being rejected by the Soviet Union; after he has done his job there, returning with all expenses paid by the U.S. Government (not usually so generous to ‘defectors’); endeavours to join anti-Castro gangs in New Orleans, but is rejected by them on the grounds that they regard him as an agent of the C.I.A.; turns up next as a supposed Chairman of a non-existent branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which denies knowledge of him or the existence of any branch either in Louisiana or Texas; applies vainly for a visa to Cuba; travels about widely, including to Mexico, with no visible source of finance. Here is typical small fry (‘so weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, that I would set my life on any chance, to mend it or be rid on ‘t’) fit to be chosen, and equipped with damning ‘evidence’ as an expendable fall guy, while a more skilled hand does the deed. By accident, when the whole of Dallas is screened in vigilant preparation, the one most strategic building on the route is overlooked. By accident the one notorious suspect, already under supervision by the F.B.I., but intended this time to be found as a suspect, is overlooked in the general rounding up and clearing out of all suspects. By accident, when immediately after the murder the whole building is swarming with police, he is able to walk out unmolested. And then the unhappy fall guy, tricked and trapped and no doubt double-crossed in face of previous promises of an easy getaway and rich reward, noisily protests his innocence, a quick shot inside the prison closes his mouth; and the shot is fired, oddly enough, again through an accidental oversight in letting this unauthorised intruder come close with a revolver, by a type described as an underworld character close to the police. No. The whole story is really too thick; and the more details are offered, the thicker it gets. Of course it will all be cleared up now by the Presidential Commission of Enquiry. Or perhaps not. Naturally we can have every confidence. For on the Presidential Commission Enquiry sits appropriately enough our old friend Allen Dulles, former Director of the C.I.A.
What Now, President Johnson?
What, then, is the prospect now for the United States and the world? It is another of the special features of the American Constitution that when the President dies or is killed, the Vice-President automatically succeeds. The smooth efficiency of this has been much admired. But the other side of the medal is less often noticed. The candidates for President and Vice-President are chosen in the dust and heat and smoky intrigues of the party conventions, with the Vice-Presidency as a kind of sinecure consolation prize for the defeated candidate. If a progressive representative is chosen to run for the Presidency, then the party machine requires that balance shall be maintained by nominating a representative of the right wing for Vice-President so as to leave everyone happy. Suddenly this tactical choice of a convention for a nominal job becomes the political choice of the country. Roosevelt had for running mate the execrable Truman; the electors chose Roosevelt, but they got Truman. When Kennedy was chosen as candidate by the Democratic convention, the balance was made by choosing for the Vice-Presidency a Southern Democrat from Texas.
The People Will Decide
No one would wish now to pre-judge the role of President Lyndon Johnson. In the past his utterances on foreign affairs have been closer to the ‘tough’ cold war line of an Acheson. His resounding crusade in West Berlin immediately after the building of the Wall of Peace, when he distributed ballpoint pens to the admiring population and with a slight lapse of historical memory proclaimed the Germans the finest and truest allies the Americans had ever had, will not easily be forgotten. He has a past to live down (not to mention the ticklish problem of extricating himself from the snowballing scandal associated with Bobby Baker, the Quorum Club and Ellen Rometsch) as well as a future to live up to. Nevertheless, he has also a record as a staunch supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He is a skilled and realist political manipulator; and that can be an important virtue in diplomacy in the present situation. Everyone will assuredly hope that, within the limits of the present stage and existing political forces in the United States, he will rise to the height of the opportunities and responsibilities of the present historic testing time, equally for the future of peace and East-West relations, and for the future of democratic rights within the United States. Above all, the real outcome depends, not on the character of an individual, but on the role of the peoples in every country in the world and on the political leadership of the working class. Not least here in Britain we can influence the outcome by our contribution and our political activity in the coming year. 1964 is General Election Year, when the defeat of Toryism can be accompanied by the advance of the fight for an effective alternative policy, such as Communism and all on the left are striving to achieve.
The second piece is by Ivor Montagu, the film-maker, and Lenin Peace Prize Winner (1959):
Labour Monthly, November 1964, pp.499-503, & 506-509
The Warren Report
By Ivor Montagu
Legend already relates that when Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed to accept the Chairmanship of the Kennedy Enquiry Commission he wept. He had good reason. Just as others had good reason to press him to undertake it. It is interesting to speculate what would have been the reception of its report had the Commission been headed by another of its members – for instance Alan Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency chief whom Kennedy let go after the Bay of Pigs, or McCloy, ex-High Commissioner in Germany, or either of the racist Democratic Senators (from Georgia and Louisiana) or the Goldwaterite Republican. ‘But Brutus is an honourable man.’ Or so said Marc Anthony when he was commenting upon another murder by conspiracy. In that case, Julius Caesar. In this, the truth itself. As it is, because of Brutus, the conspiracy has got off to a fair start. Not so fair as the reader of the British press, with its unanimous hooflick nowadays in response to any ‘moo’ of the Washington sacred cow, might imagine however. The headline in the New York Times on the day following publication (September 29) reads: ‘WARREN FINDINGS SATISFY OFFICIALS IN WEST EUROPE: MUCH OF PUBLIC SCEPTICAL.’ Just so.
The main impact of the report is its voluminousness. It is a real bucket of brainwash. 718 often repetitious pages, a list of 552 witnesses, innumerable staff, a score or so of volumes of testimony promised ultimately – who, after this, would be ungrateful enough to doubt the thoroughness with which the job was done. The old army sweat will easily recognise this technique. It was called he was hauled before the C.O., ‘blinding him with science.’ And the job? To divert attention from the source that stood out as most obviously to be accused.
In the January issue of this magazine, before ever the Commission got down to work, the editor outlined the case, the obvious pointers to C.I.A., F.B.I. and the Dallas police, that the world had seized upon and that these agencies of national and local government had to answer. Cumulatively it was damning. Every one of the counts that he enumerated is confirmed in the report. And much more. The sins of omission, the sins of commission, the facts that arouse suspicion.
It cannot be said that these accused were totally disregarded. The former head of one – Allen Dulles – sat actually on the Commission. The gathering of facts was completely – or in effect completely - entrusted to the second, the F.B.I. That neither was linked to the crimes in any way is concluded from the assurances of their chiefs. The assurance of Mr. McCone. The assurance of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover. Both gentlemen, through their subordinates, were kind enough to produce files. The CIA found no blameworthy association of Oswald with the CIA. The FBI found no blameworthy association between him and the FBI. Again and again, when a piece of evidence is cited that points in these directions we are told that the FBI found no confirmation. Exactly. There was no cross examination. When relatives of the bumped-off Lee Harvey Oswald asked to appoint counsel to represent him, they were refused. Half-way through, the Commission got cold feet about this and appointed a respected officer of the Court (who hardly ever bothered to attend), a distinguished Goldwaterite, to advise them whether they were being fair. How one would have liked to hear Lawrence Preston, or even Perry Mason, have a go at this sort of thing.
From the beginning of course, the Commission assumed that U.S. agencies cannot frame, cannot fake evidence, cannot lie. Behind them were Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Hoffa, the Presidential assurances about the U2, Adlai Stevenson’s assurances to the United Nations about the Bay of Pigs. The ink was scarcely blotted on the confessions about the pretended incidents in the Bay of Tonking. But this was its assumption. It remarks firmly that after the releases and pictures and allegations about Lee Harvey Oswald it would have been impossible to ensure a fair trial because of the assumptions any possible jury would make. And then it makes the same assumptions its own whole point of departure in a trial in which his voice was silenced.
Its starting point and its end: not only that Lee Harvey Oswald did it, but that he did it alone. This ‘alone’ was vital. Some people may wonder why, after the careful construction of threads tying Oswald to the U.S.S.R., to Communists, Trotskyists, Cuba, etc., someone changed his mind and the ‘alone’ version, followed by the Commission, was followed instead, from within an hour or two of his arrest. Someone was sensible. These threads were altogether too thin and must snap under any weight. It was too dangerous to have any live accused whose counter-attack might smash the whole thing. After all, the Reichstag Fire Trial was not without its lesson. To prove the Communists guilty, the prosecution revealed evidence that Van der Lubbe could not have done the job alone. As nothing could implicate the Communists, the Nazis pointed at themselves and all the efforts nowadays to whitewash them are bound to fail. How much handier to have bumped off Van der Lubbe on the spot, instead of merely drugging him, and then had a posthumous enquiry commission with Goering as a member and the Gestapo in sole control of collecting evidence.
To reach their preordained conclusion, the Commission had to do some splendid wriggling. The student of the report will notice three outstanding features. First, that when there is any conflict of evidence the Commission threads itself neatly through it, adopting anything consistent with its theory, dismissing as ‘mistaken’ anything that contradicts it. The doctors who first examined Kennedy thought he was shot from the front. Easy, they were mistaken. Some witnesses thought the shots heard were fired from the depository, some from the bridge. Easy, the first were right, the second wrong. Contradictions in time and identity alike are solved by this convenient formula. However, sometimes this wears a little thin. Witnesses who saw Oswald in inconvenient places were mistaken in their recognition – they had seen T.V. pictures of him and this vitiates their evidence. But on the other hand, in their conclusion the Commission claim that nine witnesses saw Oswald kill Tippett or run away after his murder. It becomes a little ingenuous of them to ignore (what they admit later in their text) that the same reservation applies to these. Sometimes they make downright mistakes. One awkward identification of Oswald is dismissed because the ‘Oswald’ seen got drunk, and Lee Harvey, the Commission says, did not drink. But the report later describes an incident in which he did, most thoroughly. (Incidentally, a tantalising reference occurs (p.628) to ‘the English language edition of the Daily Worker,’ allegedly read by Oswald. One would like to know more about this paper.)
On one crucial question let us examine the Commission’s treatment of the question whether it was possible for a man like Oswald to fire the shots and hit the President. This is a clear example of its method. It knows that there is a great question whether one man with such a rifle could accurately have fired the number of shots available in the given time. So first it is anxious to minimise the number of shots. After a lot of weighing and microscopic examination of the bullets (and no explanation of the interval before traces of bullets were looked for on the ground) it concludes that the number must have been three or four and plumps for three. After analysing the evidence of times shots were heard and wounds were seen it comes to the conclusion that if, of the three bullets fired, two hit Kennedy and one hit Governor Connolly the time necessary would have been 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. But this is inconvenient because it comes too close to the time taken for these shots in their tests. So they have the magnificent idea that if one shot missed, and if this was not the middle one but the first or third, the time evidence could be held to give up to 7.1 or even 7.9 seconds. Accordingly in their report they not only state it as a possibility, that one shot hit both Kennedy and Connolly, but conclude it as a fact, loading a headline THE SHOT THAT MISSED, although this is absolutely contrary not only to Connolly’s impression but to the insistent evidence of Connolly’s wife, also in the car, who is determined it was after Kennedy was hit that she heard the shot that hit her husband. The Commission argue that this is perfectly consistent with their conclusion because sound does not travel instantaneously. According to the distance it gives, the sound would have reached Mrs.
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Paul, I was just reading your thread on Vietnam and was about to write a complimentary post there...then realized it was you who were the source of the skepticism on Weisberg and found this gloating post. Listen, you are obviously bright and able to think deductively and not follow the pack. Fine. I have been studying JFK for decades, read hundreds of books on the subject and ALL of Weisbergs twice. I also had a letter exchange with him and a few phone conversations. Add to that, many of those I have worked with have also had close research connections with him. I don't have his books with me at the moment or would look up the reference you mention, but the idea that he was pro-WC/CIA/FBI or anything of that flavor is just outlandish and incorrect. It has to be out of context or misconstrued. Perhaps he didn't fully realize that intrugue surrounding the film and its likely alteration - but even that is hard for me to believe. I don't know why you have this axe to grind with one of the fathers of the research on the case against the govenment..but you should withhold declaring 'victory' on this....it seems you are newer than many here to this field - not that one couldn't right off the bat find something new...I think this is a red herring that has no merit. Send in a friendly way. Reconsider it. Peter
Peter,
I like what I've seen of you, and your posts. I take, believe it or not, no pleasure in following the logic of the case, and rounding on someone whose work I initially thought irreproachable. But as you well understand, the CIA played - is playing - a deep and dark game; and we must meet that challenge.
Let me offer you a concrete example of why I turned against Weisberg:
"In one of those tricks of fate which later assume importance, this motorcade had no photographic car in the lead, no camera trained on the President from the front or otherwise close and with him in constant focus"
(Whitewash: The Report of the Warren Commission (NY: Dell, December 1966), p.30)
I must put it to you that the above is preposterous: It was no accident; and that Weisberg was too shrewd to have believed any such thing.
I wont labour the point, but I ask you, as you so politely asked me, to reconsider.
Best wishes,
Paul
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I don't care if Weisberg was good with puppies - he still sought to sell the Z-fake as an authentic record. It isn't, and he lied. Period.
Uh, you left out the part about him being a "witting servant of the CIA."
How very true - he was. Nothing to say about Mr. Lardner? Thought not.
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I stumbled across some talk that LHO watched the 1954 film, "Suddenly" a few nights before the assassination. Does anyone know this to be true, or is it just an urban legend? It's been years since I've seen this movie, but from what I remember, it has some similarities to what happened in Dallas 9 years later. Sinatra even had the film pulled from circulation after the assassination, during which time the copyrights expired and the film entered public domain and was again available.
I'm guessing that the TV listings for the week or two prior to 11/23/63 should be available somewhere, or has this already been discussed and busted (or verified)?
JWK
Slightly off the beat, but relevant: Do you know anything about the company that made "Suddenly" - who financed it, that sort of thing?
Paul
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Bill,
Apologies for the delay in responding – off looking at other things.
And may I say what a pleasure it is to encounter an old opponent from the Department of Zapruderland Security (DZS). At the sight of Miller lumbering into view, I just know I’m going to have some fun. So let’s get to it….
Paul, Mike has raised some valid points pertaining to your responses.No he hasn’t: He spat his dummy out because I refused to take seriously two of his splendidly absurd propositions. You agree with him, as we shall see, because you’ve a record of responding with strikingly similar guff.
Here’s Mr. H’s prize pair of nonsenses:
1. Zapruder’s testimony in 1968 is to be preferred to Zapruder’s description of the film on the afternoon of 22 November 1963, even though the latter, with respect to the first version of the Z film capturing the presidential limo’s turn from Houston onto Elm, was confirmed independently by at least two journos, CBS’ Dan Rather and Snider of the Chicago Daily News, within days of the assassination;
2. That Zapruder really meant “at an acute angle from me back down Elm toward Houston” when he said the first bullet struck Kennedy “as the car came in line almost” with him. Again, I furnished prior independent corroboration of Zapruder’s own Warren Commission testimony/description from two newspaper reports, one by an anonymous AP-er, the second from John Herbers of the NYT.
Unless we assume the four journos above were psychic, none could have known that the Z-film was to be suppressed. All described what they or their sources had seen in Dallas – note, not where CIA (Life) was altering its version – in the reasonable expectation that the version they saw would appear on U.S. television. As you know, I think it did.
The true measure of any researcher’s authenticity is how he/she deals with inconvenient evidence. Hulk Hogan fell at the first hurdle. He couldn’t even bring himself to mention the independent journalistic corroboration, never mind furnish some rational account of how and why it was to be discounted. In previous exchanges, I’d dealt with Hogan with courtesy and honesty. Hogan showed he couldn’t deal with key points, so simply evaded them. I thereupon adopted the motto of that legendary British JFK researcher, Sir Arthur Strebe-Greebling: “Why bother?!”
Hogan’s pattern of evasion was repeated in regard to my point that Zapruder testified that he was conscious of the potential street sign impediments on Elm, and positioned himself accordingly to avoid them. Odd, then, to find a bloody big street sign blocking his camera line of site!
But I am haunted, as I suggested earlier, when reading Hogan’s responses, by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Haven’t I heard Hogan’s guff somewhere before? Ah, yes, from Bill Miller. What an extraordinary coincidence. Could this be – I tremble at the line of wild speculation upon which I am embarked – the official DZS line?:
Let’s compare Hogan and Miller on the point 2 above.
Here’s Hogan:
Hogan on 14 August 2006 I this thread:“[Zapruder at Shaw trial – PR] in describing the film this time, he says "As they were approaching where I was standing I heard a shot...." Different semantics than his WC testimony and to me, at least, not entirely inconsistent with frame 190 or so......Two or three seconds later Kennedy's Lincoln would no longer be approaching, but more in front of Zapruder, I think.
“Semantics,” forsooth! The testimonies are patently irreconcilable. Now here is your vastly different piece of weasling:
Bill Miller on JFK Lancer Forum, 26 January 2006#41689, "RE: Z-film chain of possession needs revising?"
Now what did the AP report mean by "abreast" to Zapruder. One thing comes to mind. One is that Elm Street angles away from Zapruder and is doing so as JFK come from behind the road sign, but the Z film gives a false impression that JFK is out in front of Zapruder.
Ho-hum The DZS party line, methinks.
I couldn't help but notice that some of your remarks seem to be in opposition to things you have posted on Lancer, unless I am thinking of another person.Sorry, Bill, but you are. That old amnesia rearing its ugly head again? We’ll explore that issue shortly.
And come on, Bill, who ya kiddin’? Of course you could help yourself – who else could? (Cancel that: Mr. Dunkel?)
In truth, this is a characteristically bungled attempt to repay an old bull’s eye I landed some months ago. Let us - purely in the interests of historical accuracy, you understand - revisit that terrible moment for you. I have my handkerchief at the ready. Cue the violins:
Rigby to Miller, JFK Lancer forum, June 2006Ron,
My old sparring partner Mr. Bill Miller has been assailed by a most terrible memory lapse. I feel honour bound to help him, this noblest of opponents, in his hour of photographic amnesia.
On June 4, you asked him: “Do you know which specific [Zapruder] frames were published in Life [29 November 1963 edition]? (Sorry if this has already been covered; I have not plowed [sic] through Part 1 of this thread.)”
To this straightforward question, our photographic eminence replied, a day later, as follows: “I'd have to research it. I think Trask mentioned it in his books.”
But did Bill have to research it in Trask’s books? Not according to the evidence of a posting of his on 25 May, 2006, on the John Simkin-moderated Education Forum/JFK site.
Here – see below, I’m sure Mr. Simkin wont object to a little healthy cross-pollination – we find Bill relaying a lengthy Gary Mack assist addressing precisely this question:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...6733&st=120
25 May 2006, Today, 03:30 AM
Below is some data that I was able to obtain from Gary Mack concerning this discussion.
Bill
G.Mack:
LIFE's November 29, 1963 issue went to press late Sunday afternoon, 11/24, and subscribers started receiving their copies in the Tuesday, 11/26 mail. Orville Nix, Jr. has said he picked one up at a Dallas newsstand on Monday, 11/25, but there's no way to know for sure if his memory is accurate about that.
For subscribers to have received that issue on Tuesday or Wednesday means that within 48 hours of the assassination - before the Muchmore, Nix or Bronson films of the shooting were taken out of their cameras to be processed - LIFE chose and started printing 31 Zapruder frames in black & white. Here are the frame numbers appearing in that magazine:
126, 144, 166, 216, 226, 228, 232, 237, 244, 248, 254, 258, 261, 267, 269,
323, 325, 328, 337, 340, 342, 348, 351, 353, 355, 357, 359, 361, 363, 366,
and 369.
To promote the sale of the issue, LIFE temporarily licensed at least seven
frames to the Associated Press and United Press International for
distribution. Newspapers all over the world published them beginning on
Wednesday, 11/27. For example, The Sixth Floor Museum's collections include
the Brisbane, Australia Telegraph for 11/27. Almost half of its front page
is frame 230. Additional frames 237, 274, 307, 348, 369, and 382 appeared
on pages 2 and 3 of that newspaper.
Less than two weeks after LIFE's 11/29 regular issue, the magazine released
a special Memorial Edition devoted entirely to the assassination. That
issue included nine Zapruder frames in color, some of which were published
for the first time: 183, 226, 232, 258, 277, 309, 346, 369, and 392.
This means LIFE magazine published a total of 39 different frames of the
Zapruder film within two weeks of the assassination. The frames showing
President Kennedy, 144-392, cover a time period of 13.6 seconds.
This post has been edited by Bill Miller: Today, 04:28 AM
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Mr. Mack’s match-ups of frames, but I can for his account of the earliest newspaper publication of Zapruder frames: It’s factually incorrect.
Zapruder frames appeared in the Daily Express in central London on the very late evening of Monday, 25 November 1963, as part of the following day’s edition, some time before their alleged debut in the pages of the “Australia Telegraph for 27/11.”
In the U.S., four Zapruder frames were apparently scheduled for publication on the front page of the afternoon/evening paper, the Philadelphia Daily News on Tuesday, 26 November. Here is the blurb immediately above the four photos, under the headline “Man Who Came to See JFK Makes Tragic Movie”: “These dramatic pictures are from an 8mm ‘home movie’ reel, shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder who went to see President Kennedy ride through cheering throngs in Texas city. His camera recorded one of the most tragic moments in American history. Story page 3.”
Here is the article, in full, on page 3:
UPI (Dallas), “Movie Film Shows Murder of President,” Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.3 (4 star edition):
“An amateur photographer shot an 8-MM movie film that clearly shows, step-by-step, the assassination of President Kennedy.
The film was made by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dress manufacturer. He is selling rights to the film privately. It has been seen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and representatives of the news media.
It is seven feet long, 35 seconds in colour, a bit jumpy but clear.
It opens as the Kennedy motorcade rounds the corner from Houston Street and turns into Elm Street.
Then it picks up the President’s car and follows it down toward the underpass. Suddenly, in the film, Kennedy is seen to jerk. It is the first shot.
Mrs. Kennedy turns, puts her arms around him. A second later, the second shot. The President’s head becomes a blur on the film, lunged forward and up. The second bullet has torn into the back of his head.
He rolls towards Mrs. Kennedy and disappears from sight. Mrs. Kennedy lurches onto the flat trunk deck of the Presidential car as a Secret Service man races to their aid. She is on her hands and knees. She reaches for him. He leaps up on the bumper. She pulls him up on the bumper or he pushes her back as the film ends.
Other films show the car never stopped, but raced to the Parkland Memorial Hospital with Mrs. Kennedy cradling the President.”
There is just one minor problem: The four stills on the front page are all from…the Muchmore film!
The obvious question arises: Was this a simple mistake - or evidence of something much more interesting?
Did Zapruder frames appear in the very first (five star?) edition that day, only to be supplanted in later ones by Muchmore frames?
I don’t know the answer. Perhaps someone reading this does. Bill? Still with us?
And so to the crowning glory. Search me for where this last one came from. Presumably Bungler Bill wants to steer the debate in a direction he feels more comfortable with?
Now having said this .... supposed you tell us what reporters said that they actually saw on the Zapruder film on 11/23/63 that the limo made its wide turn from Houston to Elm Street?Bill Miller
I’ve never referenced any such. Who you thinking of? Go on, give us a clue. Or perhaps ask Mr. Lamson. He always seems terribly keen to buy one.
Your enduringly grateful opponent,
Paul
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To date, not one Forum member has agreed with your assessment of Weisberg, including people that met him, were helped by him, and spent time with him.
Childish stuff. As I noted previously, no argument of substance, just a call for help. Presumably the Department of Zapruderland Security will again despatch Bill Miller to the attempted rescue.
And of course Weisberg would help, everyone from the genuine enquirer from Hicksville to, er, George Lardner, Jr., that committed truth-seeker from WaPo. That was his cover.
I don't care if Weisberg was good with puppies - he still sought to sell the Z-fake as an authentic record. It isn't, and he lied. Period.
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Just to clarify, Mike Hogan is a good guy and was not insinuating anything by starting this post.
All the best,
John Geraghty
John,
You seem to be, but he ain't, and he is.
The principle of getting your asset out front and steering the debate is as old as intelligence bureaucracies. The Agency didn't invent it, but it sure as hell used it post-November 22, 1963.
Here's Napoleon's chief spook, Joseph Fouche, on the subject:
“There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three.” [Hubert Cole. Fouche: The Unprincipled Patriot (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd., 1971), p.140, PRO, FO 27/63.]I understand the resistance to examining the "deep politics" of the Warren Report's critics: I initially shared it. But facts, no matter how tough or disillusioning, must be faced. Weisberg's work is a trade-off. In return for some good stuff, he quietly shunts you in the wrong direction. For the most part, he does it with vigour, and no little chutzpah. As I've observed about him before, he was very bright - and thoroughly misleading.
Paul
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On August 13, discussing the Zapruder film, Paul Rigby posted:The really startling meaning of Weisberg’s passage is much more interesting: He was part of the cover-up. Only a witting servant of the CIA could conceivably have written: “It would have been better had Life been able to buy all the films exposed at Dealey Plaza that day…” (Whitewash II: The FBI-Secret Service Cover-up, NY: Dell, May 1967, pp.217/8).
In the same thread Rigby also wrote:
Now how did Weisberg, this highly intelligent man with war-time experience in the OSS, deal with this (Zapruder's) testimony? Did he deal with it competently and honestly? Not a bit of it.Instead, he sought to assist the Warren Report liars........And:
Of course, we don’t have to rely on my interpretation of Zapruder’s word alone, though you wouldn’t know it from Weisberg, who’s as anxious to suppress the confirmatory detail to follow as any Warren Commission shyster. (A challenge: name one newspaper article on the Zapruder film from the period November –December 1963 instanced by Weisberg. Some of us seek a free flow of information, while Weisy...?)Is there a Forum member that agrees with Paul Rigby that Harold Weisberg was a witting servant of the CIA?
Astonishing - not a counter-argument in sight, just an appeal for reinforcements!
I accept the complement!
Paul
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If there was a conspiracy -- and I think we're all beyond that point -- would the power behind this crime take the chance on all their plans being foiled by one alert Secret Service man doing his job?
After a couple of rounds are squeezed off, Greer turns to see JFK wounded and puts a foot on the gas and gets the hell out of Dealey Plaza, and Kennedy survives to return to Washington and his brother, the Attorney General. What happens then to those that plotted this crime?
I can see the plotters gathered around Parkland when they learn Kennedy is alive. "Oops. We forgot about the driver."
Would the conspirators really have taken that chance?
To me, it defies logic.
Excellent post, the proposition that the plotters overlooked the role of the SS is fantastic!
Best wishes,
Paul
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Paul,
Let me back up and regroup. I do not think the articles on the CIA were necessarily false. Most of it was right on -- what I was trying to say was that Lodge wasn't exposing the CIA's behavior and practices because he had a golden heart and mind, it was because he coveted what Richardson had -- his own little kingdom.
Best,
Debra
Debra,
I forgot to post this explicit denial by Starnes that Lodge was his source for Richardson's name and role. Apologies for the oversight.
The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, 24 December 1963, p.13Truman and the CIA
The murmuring chorus of Americans who are deeply concerned with the growing power and headlong wilfulness of the Central Intelligence Agency has been joined by former President Truman.
Mr. Truman must be accounted an expert witness in this matter, because it was under his administration that the CIA came into being. In a copyrighted article he wrote recently that the CIA had strayed wide of the purposes for which he had organized it.
"It has," he wrote, "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."
For writing substantially the same thing from South Viet Nam last fall, this reporter was (and still is) subjected to a calculated behind-the-scenes campaign of opprobrium at the hands of the CIA. So, indeed, has the United States' ambassador to Saigon been subjected to the same sort of behind-the-hand attack, on the theory that he was the source of my account of the CIA's heedless bureaucratic arrogance in Saigon.
Mr. Lodge, it is now charged by CIA apologists, destroyed the effectiveness of one of the CIA's most skilful agents. It is also charged that this reporter violated a gentleman's agreement in naming the agent.
Both charges are false, meaching and disingenuous.
The name of the agent, hurriedly summoned home from Saigon within 24 hours of my account of his stewardship of the huge spook operations, was John Richardson. In my several conversations with Ambassador Lodge, Richardson's name never passed between us.
It was, indeed, not necessary for any wayfaring journals to go to any such exalted figures to descry the activities of the CIA's station chief in Saigon. Richardson, a frequent visitor at the presidential palace and a close adviser to the devious and powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, was widely known in the Vietnamese capital. Until Mr. Lodge replaced Frederick Nolting as ambassador, most knowledgeable Americans and sophisticated Vietnamese regarded Richardson as the most powerful foreigner in Viet Nam.
It is nonsense to say that Lodge destroyed Richardson's value as a CIA agent. In Saigon, Richardson was as clandestine as a calliope with a full head of steam. It is, moreover, a libel to allege (as high CIA officials have alleged) that this reporter violated an agreement to shield Richardson's identity. In all my assiduous inquiries about the man, never once was it suggested that there was an agreement to keep his identity secret. If there had been any such agreement, I would, of course, have respected it even though it would have been plainly absurd in view of Richardson's notoriety.
This is, unfortunately, more than a parochial dispute between a reporter and a writhing, unlovely bureaucracy. The President of the United States himself has been misled by the CIA mythology regarding just how and by whom Richardson's utility as chief resident spook was destroyed. Neither Lodge nor any journalist cast Richardson in his role in Saigon. If CIA chief John McCone really believes that his man in Saigon was compromised by my dispatches (and presumably he does believe this or he would not have planted and cultivated the tale as thoroughly as he has) then he does not know what is going on in the huge, bumbling apparatus he nominally leads.
Mr. Truman knows whereof he speaks. Wise in the ways of malignant bureaucracy, he knows that unfettered and unaccountable power such as is vested in the CIA is bound to feed upon itself until it poses a threat to the very free institutions it was founded to safeguard. No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes. Most people in government would be appalled if they knew that already the CIA has overflowed its huge new headquarters building in McLean, Va., but it is fact that it has done.
There is far, far too much about the CIA that is unknown to far too many Americans. We will, occasionally and from time to time, twang this same sackbut. It is not a pretty tune it plays, but it is an important one.
Best wishes,
Paul
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It was an important event in the post-war history of the U.S. media, yet the murder in Greece of CBS’s George Polk in May 1948 has generated a surprisingly small crop of articles and books. I’ve read only part of that literature: In none of it have I come across any mention of Polk’s necessarily anonymous contribution to George Seldes’ remarkable weekly, IN FACT, in late March 1948.
I began reading about the case in an attempt to understand American press acquiescence in the numerous obvious lunacies advanced by the Warren Report; and the better to measure Richard Starnes’ courage in writing “‘Arrogant’ CIA Disobeys Orders In Viet Nam” (Washington Daily News, 2 October 1963, p.3). It almost goes without saying that study of the Polk case did not diminish by an iota my wonderment at the sheer, bloody-minded fearlessness of the Scripps-Howard man.
In the first of the three extracts to follow, Seldes sets the scene for the unattributed Polk despatch to follow. In the second, Polk’s piece from the same edition. In the third, Seldes identifies Polk as the author of the second piece, and points the finger of responsibility squarely at the “Greek monarcho-fascist govt.” Here I must dissent: I don’t believe the latter would have acted without permission from the nascent CIA; and I have little doubt the Agency would not have entrusted such a task to its Greek minions without intense supervision.
Interestingly, the case was handled by the New York law firm of William Donovan, the first and only head of the OSS. Day-to-day responsibility for the case fell to a youthful lawyer called William Egan Colby, future Director of Central Intelligence. The titans of the U.S. press corps – Lippmann, Morrow, Paley et al – acquiesced shamefully and without exception in the ensuing official whitewash, including the arrest and prosecution of a “communist” patsy.
The example of Polk’s fate was surely not lost on American reporters at home and abroad. It would be interesting to know to what extent it dried up the flow of under-the-counter contributions by the mainstream U.S. press corps to Seldes’ publication. If there are any Seldes/IN FACT experts out there, please feel free to chip in.
In Fact, March 22, 1948 [(No. 389), Vol. XVI, No. 25)], p.1Murder
The former Greek Govt. is now in the hands of the former monarchists and fascists. Almost every day it murders a number of former members of the Army of Liberation. These victims of fascism are not communists. The NY Herald Tribune, one of the few papers to report the truth Greece headlines them:
“GREEKS EXECUTE 8 MORE LEFTISTS HELD SINCE 1944” – Mar 4.
“PURGE OF GREEK LEFTISTS CALLED GESTURE TO U.S.” – Mar 8.
The most recent series of arrests, deportations, and executions are “the result of the Greek government’s interpretation of the Truman Doctrine,” reports NYHT’s correspondent Homer Bigart.
So long as the British were in control, the monarchist-fascist govt refrained from inflaming world public opinion by murdering members of the Liberation force; now that the U.S. Embassy and military mission advise Athens, the govt proceeds with executions.
The NYHT is one of the few papers which has denounced these Greek murders. Most of the U.S. press is silent when anti-fascists are the victims.
U.S. Embassy Lie
On the day the U.S. Embassy issued the statement that “there is as real a freedom of the press in Greece today as there is in the U.S.,” the Greek govt jailed two editors “who are socialists (but anti-communists),” according to the NYHT, which adds that the “crimes” charged against them “had been committed against the German Nazi and Italian fascist occupation forces” years ago.
It is of course possible – but not probable – that the U.S. Embassy statement is not a lie, but an ironic commentary on the U.S. press, which is 99% reactionary, follows the N.A.M. line, was 95% against the New Deal and the general welfare of the majority; or just as “free” as the Greek press.
For an uncensored report on Greek intimidation of U.S. newsmen, see wide column, page 2.
Polk’s report contains the explanation for his death, and represents a catastrophic misreading of the limits to which his opponents, both domestic and foreign, would go in defence of the Truman Doctrine. His words on the role of the NYT and its correspondent, Sedgwick, have a decidedly contemporary ring with the recent revelation that the same paper suppressed news of Bush’s vast – and thoroughly criminal - domestic “eavesdropping” (spying!) programme until the last presidential election had safely passed.
The NYT a “liberal” paper?
In Fact, March 22, 1948 [(No. 389), Vol. XVI, No. 25)], pp. 2-4Uncensored: The Truth About Greece
(IN FACT has obtained a copy of an uncensored report sent by a conservative U.S. newspaperman in Greece to his home office describing some of the conditions under which correspondents have to work. Because the newsman is still in Greece, and because his service does not desire to jeopardize its representation, this weekly has been asked not to identify the correspondent or his employer. Although IN FACT never uses uncredited material, the editors feel that the situation described herein is an important aid in understanding the news from Greece and justifies deviating from the rule. The report follows.)
Athens – In the last 2 weeks there has been a remarkable development in Greece. The propaganda line of both the communists and the dominant rightwing Populist party has become the same: both are charging the United States with “interference” in internal Greek affairs; both are charging that American activity in Greece results from Washington’s desire to use the Greek people for creation of an American empire.
For example, the secret radio station of the communist-led Greek guerilla’s has said: “The U.S. is interfering in Greece in order to suck Greece’s blood for nourishment of American imperialism.”
Athens’ royalist press has started plugging the same line, charging the U.S. with trying to establish a puppet govt in the Greek capital so that Greeks will fight America’s war against the Soviet Union. Greece’s second largest newspaper, royalist “Vrathini,” has declared:
“If one observes the notices being issued to the Greek govt by the American Administrator, Dwight P. Griswold, one must conclude that they were formulated in Tokio, addressed to the conquered Japanese or some other gangster-dominated country…Ironically these tactics are being used by a people who, through grave blunders, surrendered Europe to the worst enemies and now are trying to win the war which was lost at Yalta and Potsdam…Further, the Americans – and our other allies – are chiefly to blame for the misery, devastation, and loss of life in Greece during the past year because of refusal to give the Greek army sufficient arms for use against the bandits in the hills…”
Royalist Greek spokesmen are demanding a large number of “pack mountain 75 caliber artillery” because the guerillas allegedly have “several” such weapons. Perhaps the Royalist spokesmen do not know that the U.S. early last fall delivered 50 of these guns to Greece. Eight of the guns have been uncrated and put into use. The other 42 guns remain in Pireaus warehouse, a fate that is reserved for a large amount of any and all kinds of supplies today going to Greece…
At present the attack has two prongs, one directed against the American aid mission and the second offensive designed to discredit a number of American reporters working in Greece.
The reason for the attack on a select group of American correspondents is that they are writing stories from Greece that displease the dominant right wing govt faction and threaten to upset their plans for assuming complete control of the country.
Newspapermen Who Tell The Truth Are Slandered
Royalist “Ethnos” has denounced “irresponsible foreign correspondents” who write “unfavorable and misleading” stories about the Greek govt. “Ethnos” demands that the Greek information service be reorganized in order that a “favorable attitude toward Greek problems” be developed – unless the right wing can win its present campaign to get a number of us discredited or removed from Greece.
The attack upon correspondents is being made by the royalist political group known as the Populist Party. Under leadership of Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Constantine Tsaldaris, key Populist members throughout the govt appear to be implementing a carefully devised offensive.
[An example is cited of one correspondent, Geo Polk, who wrote an article in last December’s Harper’s magazine, which was protested by Greek Ambassador Vassili Dendramis, who concluded with the statement that the writer could have obtained facts in Athens; he had charged “completely exaggerated” reports and “complete distortion of truth.” The facts are that the Harper article was obtained from documentation supplied in Athens from 7 persons holding top administrative positions.]
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had just written to the “Christian Science Monitor” complaining that their correspondent in Greece, Constantine Argyris, is guilty of using offensive language in dealing with Greek govt officials…
Another correspondent who had drawn Greek right wing fire is Ray Daniell of the New York Times…When his articles proved displeasing for the right wing politicians, they spread malicious slander about Daniell…
Yet another reporter who has provoked the Greek right wing is Homer Bigart, of the NY Herald Tribune. At the moment, being a newcomer in Greece, Bigart is getting the “treatment” that others of us already have had. In particular he is being denounced by name as a “communist”; he is being ridiculed for “looking at things upside down”; he is being refused interviews by persons he needs to see for news purposes – such as Foreign Minister Tsaldaris.
But Pro-Fascist Newspapermen Get Favors
John O’Donovan of the London Observer is sharing Bigart’s “treatment.” Two other reporters, Stephen Barber of the London News Chronicle (Liberal) and his wife, Mary Barber of Time magazine, recently encountered a little more effective right wing retaliation. At Ioannina they were prevented for some time from proceeding to Konitsa because – and this charge was made to them in person – of being “communists.”…
Another correspondent who has encountered newsgathering troubles is Fred Sparks of the Chicago Daily News. In fact, Sparks has written a bitter story about his experiences at being denied routine press privileges while trying to cover the Konitsa battle.
The reason the system can be so well and easily rigged is that the present Greek coalition govt is dominated by the right wing – with royalist appointees holding practically all the key jobs. Prime Minister Themistocles Sofoulis, Liberal Party chief, has complained OFF THE RECORD that even he can’t anything done the way he wishes; he describes himself as a “captive” official who is officially frustrated by the men who surround him as long-term civil servants.
Yet a reporter in Greece does not need to have such troubles – provided only that he is “friendly” to the right wing govt faction. For example, A.G. Sedgwick of the NY Times not only made the trip to Konitsa recently in style by plane but took his non-writing wife along. [Editorial note: Mrs Sedgwick is Greek-born, a propagandist for the Greek royalist-fascist faction.] Both Mary Barber and Constantine Argyris were denied passage aboard the plane. Complaints to the press dept on the subject were simply laughed off.
New York Times Shifts Its Men to Please Regime
Sedgwick’s return to Greece in the fall baffled a number of persons. Following Ray Daniell’s trip to Athens last spring, Sedgwick was recalled in what we all understood to be disgrace. The sharp contrast in the copy written by Sedgwick and Daniell certainly was conspicuous. Following complaints on Sedgwick’s work, he was ordered to the U.S. and Daniell was informed a new man, Dana Adams Schmidt, would take over in Athens. Schmidt came to Greece and did a good, objective job of reporting – one that conflicted in most particulars with what Sedgwick had been writing.
But then, suddenly, Schmidt was shifted to Cairo and Sedgwick returned to Athens. There was no explanation but apparently the NY Times is not using much of his copy. Sedgwick is related to American Ambassador MacVeagh [transferred to Portugal since foregoing was written].
Sedgwick is one American correspondent who has excellent relations with the Greek right wing. He is the one American correspondent who is not getting the “business”; in fact, his reports (which I suspect he supplies in carbon copy to the Greek govt) are used almost exclusively in commentaries by Radio Athens.
[Editorial note: The NY Times since 1922, when Mussolini took over in Italy, has had a whole series of reactionary to fascist correspondents and at the same time it has fired or eased out many liberals, or influenced them to change their attitude. For example, its correspondent Wm P. Carney in Madrid cabled a story giving the exact location of all Republican anti-aircraft guns, supplying the Fascist Franco with military secrets which resulted in these guns being destroyed.]
The pattern of the right wing’s attack in other American correspondents here is clever: public denunciation plus official obfuscation.
There is nothing so tangible as censorship or blunt refusal to allow a reporter to visit the civil war areas; instead there is a clever plan of making news work in Greece as difficult as possible for critical correspondents.
Greek Govt Is Preparing to ‘Frame’ Newsmen
In addition, now that many correspondents are writing such critical stories on the dominant right wing faction of the govt, there are any number of vague hints that “somebody is likely to get hurt.” A much better possibility is that “somebody” is going to get framed in one of the officially forbidden but routine black market deals that are necessary for daily life in Athens…
For the moment the right wing is playing things carefully because Populist leader Tsaldaris and henchmen don’t want to upset Greece’s opportunity to be included in the European Recovery Plan. But once Greece is included, the right wing is prepared to move fast – break up the coalition govt, form a new one run from behind the scenes in dictatorial fashion, send parliament home, replace 200 key administrative offices of the army, police, security forces, prisons, export-import administration, and put into effect “dynamic policies.”
So the right wing is now warming to the twin-pronged campaign: shell-shocking the American aid mission, and discrediting a number of American correspondents.
Behind this scheme is the right-wing’s old conviction that the U.S. is committed to continuing aid to Greece no matter what happens in Athens. Perhaps the right wing is right.
Certainly the Populists are tough guys – among the most calculating, unscrupulous, able politicians I’ve ever known.
They are waging an embarrassingly effective campaign against the United States.
Below, and finally, Seldes identifies his previously unidentified Greek-based contributor, and laments his death.
In Fact, May 31, 1948 [(No. 399), Vol. XVII, No. 9), p.1Who Murdered Polk?
The murder of George Polk, correspondent in Greece of the Columbia Broadcasting System, has been a great shock to the world of journalism, and is especially shocking to the editors of IN FACT – and will be to its readers when they learn that the tremendously important exclusive and uncensored news item we printed in our issue of March 22 was by this writer.
As a rule, IN FACT does not print items anonymously, but to protect our source and especially to protect Polk we not only did not indicate the source, but actually inserted a paragraph about Polk himself which would throw the Greek fascist dictatorship off the scent.
When Polk was murdered in Salonika the Greek govt immediately blamed it on the “bandits and guerillas,” as the five anti-fascist groups fighting it are called by them. (Only one of the EAM-ELAS groups is communist; each of the five is about 20%.)
In the item which IN FACT published it is clearly shown that Polk was no friend of Greek monarchism, fascism and reaction. He was not pro-EAM, but he was one of the fair and honest men who was willing to report both sides. He named NY Times correspondent A C Sedgwick and others as sending out pro-fascist Greek news.
“Somebody is likely to get hurt,” Polk stated in the report to CBS which IN FACT published. He believed that if reporters told the truth – as he did – the Greek monarcho-fascist govt would not hesitate to use physical violence.”
The last time I looked, the greater part of IN FACT’s run was available online at the University of Pennsylvania’s Schoenberg Centre for Electronic Text and Image. Anyone interested in the period should give it an extended look. It’s a treasure. No wonder the U.S. government closed IN FACT down. As a CIA historian once observed, propaganda thrives best when there is no competition.
dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/AdvancedSearch.cfm
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Here's Kennedy describing the Diem over-throw three days after it occured:
http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1963_...nam_memoir.html
(quote on)
President Kennedy: Opposed to the coup was General [Maxwell] Taylor, the
Attorney General [Robert Kennedy], Secretary [Robert] McNamara to a somewhat
lesser degree, John McCone, partly based on an old hostility to [Henry Cabot] Lodge
[Jr.] which causes him to lack confidence in Lodge's judgement, partly as a result
of a new hostility because Lodge shifted his [CIA] station chief; in favor of the
coup was State, led by Averell Harriman, George Ball, Roger Hilsman, supported
by Mike Forrestal at the White House.
Cliff,
Were McCone and Colby really opposed to the November coup – er, the one in Vietnam, that is - as so many U.S. historians have sought to convince us? One interested party certainly didn’t think so - the Diem government. In a fascinating piece in the Times of Vietnam on 19 September 1963, under the headline “Pardon, CIA, Your Split Is Showing” (p.1), we find the following:
“There is now a campaign to whitewash the CIA’s costly blunder…
The Washington Post on September 17, said, ‘CIA Director John A. McCone and his assistant for Asia, William Colby, former agency head in South Viet Nam, reportedly have great confidence in the Diem-Nhu regime.’
It did not explain why, if this true, these two persons claimed to be responsible for CIA activities authorized the financing of the planned coup d’etat, and why they continue to permit the financing of continued activities aimed at overthrowing the Government of Viet Nam.”
The Washington Post whitewashing the Agency's role in a coup? Unthinkable.
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This post of mine has been too verbose and too long...
Yup. Not to mention self-pitying, illogical and dishonest.
The real Paul Rigby emerges. Your lack of a meaningful response to the issues raised in my last post actually speaks more about you and your theories than the above quote.
Paul, I'm going to resist the temptation to continue the discussion on that level. Take care.
Mike Hogan
Ah, yes, Mike Hogan in full, disputational flow, the very epitome of sweet reason and iron discipline. This the real Mike Hogan?
Aug 13 2006, 08:37 PM“So why the f___ are you asking me such rhetorical questions? Shortly after joining this Forum you and I had a go of it. Since then, I learned never to comment on anything you say. But since you saw fit to interject, I've made an exception. I don't like your style. I don't like your attitude. I don't like your methods. I don't think I like you.
You type so much crap, I've quit trying to ascertain what is accurate and what is not.”
I feel quite ashamed that I’ve never scaled those dizzy depths of intolerance and petulance!
Anyway, your hypocrisy, not to mention that transparent, nauseating amalgam of over-familiarity, oleaginousness and highly-strung fanaticism, is of no real interest or consequence – save perhaps to your shrink.
But this is interesting, mildly.
Yesterday, 12:13 AM“I submit that you have a burden of proof…”
Now, I’ve heard this sort of pseudo-legalese before. But who from?
It finally came back to me today: Stephen Dorril, in a telephone conversation, circa 1993. It is Dorril we have to thank for that immortal opening to a footnoted paragraph, “Helms is not a man I would normally trust, but in these circumstances…” (“Permindex: The International Trade in Disinformation,” Lobster, 2, (November 1983), p.30).
Coincidence? Or horses from the same table?
You take good care, Mike
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"Should be posted elsewhere..."
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Yeah, should be posted elswhere...
"Flectere si nequero superos, acherona movebo." (If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up Hell) "The Aenid" - Virgil
Vacuity allied to pretension: potent combo you got there, Mr. G!
In event that one gets to "pick and choose" then I would prefer to utilize the words of the great Mr. Dan Rather."The President's automobile was preceded by one other car"
Somewhere, I missed that the current version of the Z-film shows the "Lead" vehicle in the motorcade.
And, with all of this "lead time", which included the "Lead" vehicle, Mr. Zapruder could not get re-started in filming until after the Presidential Limousine had made the complete turn onto Elm St.
And! I am certain that as a surveyor, Mr. West would have been most curious as to exactly how the WC came up with "Position "A"" for their survey work, if no such position for JFK appeared on the film.
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/...Vol17_0464b.htm
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/...Vol18_0050a.htm
CE886. "NOT ON ZAPRUDER FILM"
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Anyone have any clue as to how one would go about positioning a vehicle onto Elm St, when in fact they reportedly do not have anything which demonstrates the position of the vehicle on Elm St.?????????????
Certainly puzzles me!
But then again, the US Secret Service seemed to have no difficulties in positioning the location of the Presidential Limo during the turn onto Elm St. off of Houston St.
But then again, they also had a first generation and "untouched" version of the Z-film, did they not?/!
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/...Vol17_0452b.htm
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Bang on the money, Tom, pleasure to read.
Paul
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Food for thought, Paul. Are you suggesting an unprovable red herring that seeds suspicion and makes probing of it a matter of national security while being a kind of 'black hole' that would tie up any future enquiry? Do I read you right?
John,
You read me perfectly.
Paul
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The story goes that Warren was beaten into taking on the Commission with a reference to 40 million dead from a nuclear war.
This has always puzzled me as to where this figure came from. A global conflagration would cause many more deaths. Other studies talked of 100's of millions.
Perhaps a clue is in Ted Soerensens 'Kennedy" where a figure of 40 million is given as the result of a U.S.A. <FIRST STRIKE>
Why would a conspiracy finding cause a first strike?
It's a hawkish move. Pre-emptive, either in anticipation of such from the other side or as a part of a strategy.
EDIT:: perhaps the question is better put
which of the possible conspiracy scenarios contemplated/indicated to Johnson could result in a first strike?
Great spot. Presumably the Cuban-Russian embassy visits?
Likely scenario:
CIA first manufactures the link, then rides to rescue of LBJ et al by nulllifying said link with photo of man manifestly not Oswald entering embassy.
Paul
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This post of mine has been too verbose and too long...
Yup. Not to mention self-pitying, illogical and dishonest.
It's not fair to selectively pick and choose what parts of Zapruder's testimony you want to use to support events as you interpret them, and then dismiss other parts of his testimony...Quite so. Have a stern word with yourself.
Which leaves us where exactly?
On 22 November 1963, Zapruder said he filmed the turn from Houston.
Reporters who viewed the film 23 November and shortly thereafter said/wrote they saw the turn.
Film as available to be viewed as film - since late 1964? - has NO turn.
Not that difficult, surely?
Paul
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If one assumes that Zapruder was honest in his testimony he would not have said what he did if the film had been substantially altered.
Mike
Mike,
Reposing all that weight on the severed crutch of Zapruder’s honesty strikes me as unwise. Valiant, but unwise. If the issue is the limo turn, whether filmed or not, then the burden is positively overwhelming.
Here is his very first public testimony on the matter:
This transcript is from video tape of the live broadcast seen nationwide on the ABC network at about 2:10pm CST, November 22, 1963. The interviewer, seated on the left, is WFAA-TV program director Jay Watson. On the right, with his hat on the desk, is Abraham Zapruder.
ZAPRUDER: “I got out in, uh, about a half-hour earlier to get a good spot to shoot some pictures. And I found a spot, one of these concrete blocks they have down near that park, near the underpass. And I got on top there, there was another girl from my office, she was right behind me.
And as I was shooting*, as the President was coming down from Houston Street making his turn, it was about a half-way down there, I heard a shot, and he slumped to the side, like this. Then I heard another shot or two, I couldn't say it was one or two, and I saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything, and I kept on shooting. That's about all, I'm just sick, I can't…”
Early viewers of the Z film (public version 1) - Rather, Snider, and, I have no doubt, others – were thus merely following the film-taker himself when they described the filmed turn from Houston onto Elm!
Paul
* Trask, Pictures of the Pain, p.77, offers the parenthetic variant “filming” for “shooting.”
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Can you or anyone else point us to a cite "quoting" Zapruder halted Elm Street filming?
Although I personally have some difficulty accepting that Zapruder stood and filmed motorcycles for 133 frames of the film, only to wait until the Presidential Limo had completely made the turn onto Elm St. prior to again beginning of filming, this is nevertheless what we are informed occurred.
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Mr. SHANEYFELT. At the time of frame 1, the police motorcycle lead portion of the parade is in view, and that goes for several frames. Then he stopped his camera, feeling that it might be some time before the Presidential car came into view. Then when the Presidential car rounded the corner and came into view, he started his camera again, and kept it running throughout the route down Elm Street until the car went out of sight on his right.
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This testimony is of course "hearsay", and is merely based on what Shaneyfelt observed in the film when he reviewed it.
Tom,
Always felt sorry for Shaneyfelt. Imagine trying to reconstruct what happened on the basis of a film previously dismissed by one of your bosses as being of "no evidentiary value"! (Was this Hoover or one of his top lieutenants? Nor can I remember the bloody date...)
I wont labour the obvious objections to Shaneyfelt's claim re the hiatus in filming: you anticipated them perfectly well.
Paul
Why did the conspirators offer the Z-film?
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
John,
The version circulating in Dallas and beyond in the period November 22-26 was quite simply a different version than the version we are familiar with.
There is no mention whatever in the early print and electronic media coverage of the first version of a centering problem: That change came with the second version, and was the consequence of a need to abolish a specific presence between the camera and presidential limo.
This obstacle's removal should be tied to the change in the direction of Kennedy's head upon impact of the fatal head shot. Dan Rather, on November 25, notoriously described that movement as "violently forward." I believe his description, not least, as I earlier pointed out in this thread, because Rather had every reason to suppose that day that the film would be shown in short order. (It was, but that's another subject...)
The version with which we are familiar today instead offers Kennedy as moving "back and to the left" - a change of shooting point from the rear, to the right front. In shifting attention to the grassy knoll, the conspirators effectively reverted to the built-in fall back position, and created what may usefully be characterised as a pillory, into which an endless supply of suspects could be slipped, switched, multiplied and retracted as and when required.
The success of that counter-intelligence gambit is all about you on this thread: 40+ years of chasing shadows on the grassy knoll.
Paul