David Andrews

I was impressed by the contra-MSM take on Putin. It's useful, too, that McGovern reminds us of the post-WW II realpolitik of George Kennan. Kennan's proposition of US dominance was the Manifest Destiny statement of the twentieth century, essentially bankrolled and propagated by the same aspects of our not-very-deep state that set Foster Dulles at its helm.

People may like to read this, first of a two-part interview with Ray McGovern, former-CIA, at Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2016/02/07/intelligent_people_know_that_the_empire_is_on_the_downhill_a_veteran_cia_agent_spills_the_goods_on_the_deep_state_and_our_foreign_policy_nightmares/

In his interview filmed for The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Bethesda lab tech Paul O'Connor refers to the pink/grey casket as a military-issue item that would become familiar to hospital staff as the Vietnam war escalated. A strange thought occurs: Could a shipping casket or two be standard emergency items kept in the cargo holds of Air Force One and Two? If not a SOP, could it have been argued into existence ahead of the Dallas trip?

W. Averell Harriman. Rockefeller family. We've been down these roads before - without drawing conclusions about the assassination or cover-up.

A pre-prepared body double or a Tippit substitution doesn't jibe with the falsified x-rays and autopsy photos made available, unless the intent was to create irreconcilable chaos instead of a cover story. Had this happened, at what time point could the cover-up artists be certain that furor would not erupt over the chaos they'd created?

We find Oswald in Will Fritz's interrogation notes defending Ruth Paine prematurely when a station wagon similar to hers is brought up in questioning - but Oswald's verbosity suggests he was actually trying to inculpate her, or at least drag her name in as some kind of character reference for his intelligence work: "Now everybody will know who I am."

Let us not forget the sweeping, anti-communist Central America war of the 1980s, am ugly stopgap between crumbling Russia and the rise of radical Islam

I missed something in all the hubbub. How are people who would talk about their supposed bankrolling of a JFK assassination plot liable to be hit by the mob? Are Walker and the JBS working with the mob? Isn't that something the CIA did?

I think that it will sell better if it's a combined family memoir and a study of what you've learned about anti-Castro and intelligence work in researching your father's life. That's why I suggested Gaeton Fonzi's book to look at, because it's partly a memoir of his journey investigating the Kennedy hit. Publishers love the "journey" structure - it's a form of storytelling that they understand, and that sells well to readers. I don't know your first book or whether it was print book or e-book. But you have the makings of a print book seller in the family story and anti-Castro community research that I've seen on this Forum. So, to add to what Paul said above, you should also be writing a timeline of your research into the anti-Castro movement and the intelligence community. That's the all-important second half of your work. Unlike Paul, I think you do have to be a historian here. Do it before a publisher's editor compels you to do it - you'll be happier with the results, and make a better book. Remember the old truism about Picasso - you have to learn the rules of art before you can break them.

If monied interests wanted JFK dead, Dulles would be the ideal interface, as he had been between Wall Street and the CIA, in the case of the Guatemala coup.

What I was getting that is this. Publishers want you to present a story in a structural form that appeals to readers. This means chapter structure, paragraph structure, sentence structure. If you send them a book typescript that looks like something they can sell - they will buy it and assign a textual editor to review it with you and improve it. If you study books that you like as models of memoir and intelligence study, than the typescript you prepare, and the publisher accepts, is closer to what you want than the result might be if you just ask someone to make your sentences better and whatnot. If you prepare something that gets across what you want in the way you want to tell it, and sell that, you're better off in the long run than just adjusting technical points of writing and having the publisher's editor reshape your story into her opinion of how the story should be in order to sell. Hitchcock only used to shoot so much film, so that the studio's editors couldn't re-cut his movies differently than he envisioned them. It's the same with books. Do most of the editor's job, and the editor can only improve on that, and not give you an adjusted story that you might not like in the end. Write your version of a memoir/intelligence study that will sell, so that you don't end up with the editor's version.

Scott - One of the best things you can do is search the non-fiction sections of libraries for books that tell their stories in similar ways to the way you want to tell yours, and learn from them how to edit and shape your typescript so that a publisher will accept it and a publisher's editor will work with you on preparing the book for publication. These need not necessarily be works on intelligence history, but can be memoirs, or histories written by participants in the story, etc. Family memoirs unrelated to intelligence work may be of help with some parts of your book, going by the material in your post. Your father's story is interwoven with the stories of a number of people who figure in historical works, and at least one well-known figure, Frank Sturgis. There's every reason that a print publisher would be interested. I imagine your work also incorporates present-day, first-person research into the anti-Castro movement and its survivors. All this can be sold between covers. You need to look at published works as a way of internalizing the forms of storytelling that publishers find sellable, so that you can sell your book to a publisher as work that they can envision a market for. If you include a lot of historical detail, and the results of your interviews with persons who knew your father and his milieu, you will need to back up your research with some form of endnoting that will support your findings and conclusions. If, instead, you choose to go with a memoir format, endnoting is less important, as you are presenting yourself as the witness to what you write. Just be prepared to answer any contradictions that may be raised, by publishers or readers. I really wish I could take this trip with you, but there are things that prevent me, such as my financial survival. Let me recommend to you one book that I think might help, and which you may have studied already: Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation. This book strikes a nice balance between memoir and history. You may want to tell your story differently, but you will find useful things to compare in Fonzi, such as chapter structuring, creating paragraphs, and presenting personal experience with a historical subject. I can't remember if Fonzi cites his historical sources in endnotes, but whether he does or not will give you tips in how to present information. Compare what Fonzi did to other books, and work out the method that works for you. Remember, all information in a book is a form of storytelling. Other types of memoir and first-person history can help you handle different areas of your book. Checking out published memoir and history in your subject area is also an excellent way to find publishers interested in your material. Pay attention to the publishing dates and the number of editions that a book has been through for cues on getting a publisher that can give your book some shelf life. For instance, if you read a book that is in your subject area, was it published at the time of any event related to the Kennedy/Cuba era. (HSCA? The movie JFK? The ARRB?) Is that book still in print? Has a revised edition with more material been published? These are things that can help you plan. You are the best person to put your book into a form that a publisher will buy and that achieves what you hope to present a reader. Good luck. I'm sure everybody here would like to see your good results. Can others suggest some comparative literature in memoir and history that might be of help?

Delete, please.

I think the term "point man" might have served better than "CEO" for Dulles. This better describes his role in his Latin American dealings for United Fruit, for instance.

I've read both Newman's books, but too long ago to discuss in specifics, as I worked from library copies. I want to have a second go, as the Oswald book is difficult to find elsewhere. Wonder why. I got Talbot's Devil's Chessboard from the library and read it hurriedly, as there's a long wait list. I can give some impressions later this week. Now we are six, Yul Brynner.

I think that, as Jim DiEugenio, David Talbot, and others have pointed out, it was Dulles' longtime relations with the interests that supported big steel, big oil, the Federal Reserve, and corporate-backed military actions in Southeast Asia and Indonesia that would motivate Dulles to be point man in the assassination for CIA and Wall Street. Also, the circumstances of an enforced resignation of Dulles, Bissell and Cabell in the year of the BOP and the attempted coup in France were a bit more humiliating than any planned retirement Dulles envisioned. (We can throw in that JFK had even Dulles' sister Eleanor removed from her innocuous bureaucratic job at State, so deep was the animus against the family.) These circumstances, and the money interests' opposition to Kennedy, may have combined to cause Dulles to stay on in an unacknowledged leadership role at CIA as David Talbot describes, and to place him on the Warren Commission. "Who's being naïve here, Kay?" -- Michael Corleone in The Godfather

Bradley Cooper as Castro! Viva!

​"Anyway this shows without a shadow of a doubt that he was one of Willoughby's boys boys and that Richard Nagell of FOI took the shot at Walker at the behest of Gen. Macarthur who had told JFK not to get involved in a land war in Asia. So someone had to pay and that was Larry Schmidt, Otto Skorzeny and Gerd von Runstedt's butler. "And that's no theory; you can look it up" Where can I look up the Nagell-MacArthur part, and Nagell shooting at Walker?

More on this O'Donnell angle, please. Soon. Off topic a bit: "But there was bigger news on November 22, 1963--President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, LBJ's stomping grounds, after LBJ and his crony Albert Thomas begged him to come to Dallas. Albert Thomas is the man LBJ is seeing winking with [Johnson] on Air Force 1 immediately after his abrupt swearing in as president--beside a blood-soaked Jackie Kennedy--on November 22, 1963." It's sad and disgusting that Thomas - celebrated by JFK in Texas because of Thomas's terminal illness - would choose to go out leaving behind the partisan reputation he made during the swearing-in. Hell was yawning for him, though I suspect it was yawning at Thomas before he got there.

But my book has one serious issue, wondering if it's just a fluke in the printing, but there are no numbers on any of the pages to correspond with the many footnotes at the back. It's frustrating. Dawn The endnotes refer to the page numbers. It's a modern style that sometimes omits references to things that one is specifically interested in verifying or further researching.

I hope they put up a bronze plaque to Thomas Mallon.

Have we eliminated the possibility that the wound/tracheostomy site has been moved in the autopsy photos? The evulsed trach incision in the "Stare of Death" shot in particular looks like a lurid photo fake. As seen in the National Archives, is JFK's necktie still in one piece, albeit nicked? My mother was an emergency room nurse by 1963, and I know that standard practice is to avoid "haste" and fumbling and just pull up the collar and cut the necktie in two with blunt-tipped bandage scissors, through the narrow band an inch or two away from the knot. Was someone really slicing away with a scalpel near the president's throat, in "haste"? Every emergency room has a surfeit of those blunt-tipped scissors for cutting off clothing as well as cutting gauze bandages.

To state the obvious for the LNers: There is no irrefutable evidence that Oswald owned the Carcano, and all of the post-assassination testimony and photo evidence is, if not refutable, highly suspect due to circumstances and to the credibility of the witnesses. Suspect also is any witness claim to Oswald's involvement in the Walker shooting. If you accept these things as fact, you accept them on nearly the same basis that the Warren Commission did. Perhaps on the same basis if your motivation is identical. A debunking book on the Paines is long, long overdue, and if written should not ignore Michael Paine's downplayed association with Oswald, such as their attendance together at Walker meetings. It is also important to determine definitively whether Ruth kept Cuba-related files, and what the size and arrangement of her collection was, as these have been called into dispute. Are the Cuba-related documents the reason for a Minox camera and light meter in the Paine household?

It's a grillework facade, most visible in the "Three Tramps" photo series. Still there in Dealey today.

I suspect Ruby would like to say things that Bill Decker is inhibiting - things about other than the JBS and Walker. Ruby is acknowledging that he's playing under Decker's influence.