David Andrews

Trump is the clown the GOP put out this year, so that in the future they can introduce a moderate candidate who will score in the debates and win the nomination. Trump gets paid off for this charade, if only in barter. It's like when they used to put out aspartame-vanilla Bob Dole, and then eclipse him with a salable, winnable candidate. Only now, they've taken the US rectal temp and decided to put forth a rabble-rouser as a sacrifice, or rather Judas-goat. Trump's withdrawal is forewritten, bet on it in Vegas. Trump, Rand Paul and Chris Christie in a GOP debate - Jesus, it was like a clown car emptying out. So please consider my motto: Sometimes things are just as naked as they appear.

It's like what comedians used to say about aliens: "Why do they always visit people who live in trailers and drive pickup trucks? Why not Einstein?"

"Well, he would say that, wouldn't he." -- Mandy Rice-Davies

Hard to believe shrewd guys like that didn't get a cut. Harriman's cut came firstly from Southeast Asia, which he obtained by making war. It would be interesting to evaluate Ave's career for other coincident involvement with narco-states.

In this hypothesis, then, Edwin Walker and his people didn't need to fear being killed as JFK witnesses -- because they were the ones doing the killing. But the cover-up held the power cards: Roselli and Giancana went down, but Walker died in obscurity, his only reward the return of his pension in the next decade. Winner Take Nothing, as Hemingway put it?

At the time of HSCA and the Church Committee, persons sometimes associated with the assassination began turning up dead. Why not Edwin Walker? For that matter, why not John Rousselot or Guy Gabaldon? Looking back on Walker's letter complaining that Jack Ruby was about to be transferred out of Dallas custody, one is reminded of Gerry Hemming's note that many people laid down cash for Kennedy's assassination, then were told that their contribution had made them equally successful and guilty. Walker's fears about Ruby may have been based on culpability that he was only assured existed for him. Again, this man so worried about Dallas losing control of Jack Ruby's tongue survived to become a park prowler, and couldn't get to walk out the back door of the Dallas cop shop after a morals bust. Then he did it again. Overconfident? The critic Walter Benjamin noted that in literature death is the great validator: a character's death epitomizes his life and comments on it. Thus the differing spectacles of John Kennedy and Edwin Walker.

If a large conspiracy and larger cover-up were perpetrated against Kennedy with Walker at its head, one wants to know what political allies Walker retained in US military leadership after his resignation and throughout his post-military political activities. This is something that is somewhat missing in the Caufield book, other than the Charles Willoughby association. Did Walker have political support in the military after his resignation?

Not to go on about this, but a rap sheet such as this is hardly indicative of the lifestyle of one who, a dozen years before, is alleged to have taken out the POTUS. Did some kind of reward come to Walker for organizing such grand conspiracy? He couldn't even buy off the Dallas cops at the time of his two arrests. Take a look at the 1963-era pictures of Walker's Turtle Creek house and compare it to real estate listing photos taken in this decade, or look at it today on Google Earth. Any financing Walker collected was sufficient only to print the boxes of provocative literature piled up inside. It's the house of a recluse and an obsessive, a tool trotted out by others who needed an opposition figurehead, and that status was afforded him solely due to his "martyrdom" at the hands of the Kennedys. With a more moderate administration in the White House, and an active anti-communist war escalating, Walker became a puppet with cut strings. There would be no more presidential bids, no elective office of any kind. When his phone calls were returned, the replies became condescending and off-putting, and then ceased to appear. He couldn't make the money for Texas oil and industry that a Texan president in control of the defense budget could. One thinks of George Lincoln Rockwell, gunned down because he had to go to the same laundromat every week.

An interesting exchange of letters in The New York Review of Books (Sept. 30, 2010) concerning the Vietnam withdrawal and the Diem coup. NB, it would be distinctive if JFK distrusted Michael V. Forrestal, as Forrestal was the son of onetime JFK mentor James V. Forrestal. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/would-jfk-have-left-vietnam-exchange/ To the Editors: In his essay “Mac Bundy Said He Was ‘All Wrong’” [NYR, June 10], William Pfaff claims that Gordon Goldstein’s book Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam “should settle for good the controversy over whether President Kennedy, had he not been assassinated, would have enlarged the war or would have withdrawn the still-limited number of American troops in Vietnam.” Pfaff writes that the “Bundy material” collected by Goldstein is “conclusive” and demonstrates that Kennedy had made a decision to disengage from Vietnam. I believe this to be facile in the extreme. First, Pfaff reports that Goldstein’s book is largely drawn from McGeorge Bundy’s “notes, text fragments, draft memoir passages, and the like” collected by Goldstein, who was assisting Bundy on a memoir that was largely incomplete at the time of Bundy’s death in 1996. While Bundy’s notes written decades after the war are a welcome addition to the historical record, they are by definition not contemporaneous source material. As he did with Goldstein, Bundy told me in my interviews with him that he thought Kennedy would have acted differently than Lyndon Johnson, particularly after the 1964 presidential election. But this remains in the realm of opinion, not documentary evidence of a decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Second, Pfaff quotes from an Oval Office recording of October 2, 1963, in which Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara is heard telling Kennedy, “We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it.” The President’s advisers were debating that morning whether to announce the withdrawal of one thousand of the 16,000 US advisers stationed in Vietnam by the end of 1963. Kennedy agreed to issue a public announcement of the departure of one thousand advisers. Pfaff thinks this is conclusive proof of Kennedy’s intentions. Goldstein himself treats this evidence gingerly. And for good reason. For one thing, the full transcript of that October 2 conversation makes it very clear that McNamara and Bundy were also telling the President that they were confident that the South Vietnamese army could repress the Viet-cong insurgency by the end of 1964. As I wrote in my own biography of Bundy, The Color of Truth (1998), Kennedy himself on October 2 told Bundy and McNamara that he “objected to the phrase ‘by the end of the year’ in the sentence” announcing the withdrawal of one thousand advisers. Why? Because he “believed that if we were not able to take this action by the end of the year, we would be accused of being over optimistic.” McNamara, however, pressed Kennedy to retain the year-end deadline “in order to meet the view of Senator Fulbright and others that we are bogged down forever in Vietnam.” Clearly, McNamara was concerned with political and public relations factors. Elsewhere in the conversation, it becomes obvious that McNamara’s withdrawal plan was contingent on getting the South Vietnamese to fight. General Maxwell Taylor is heard chiming in to say that when he asks his army officers, "When can you finish this job in the sense that you will reduce this insurgency to little more than sporadic incidents? Inevitably, with the exception of the [Mekong] Delta, they would say, ‘64 would be ample time.’ I realize that’s not necessarily…I assume there’s no major new factors entering [unclear]. I realize that…." And then President Kennedy interrupts Taylor to say, “Well, let’s say it anyway. Then, ‘65, if it doesn’t work out, [unclear: we’ll get a new date].” The evidence is obviously murky. There is nothing clear-cut in these conversations one way or the other. But it is probably safe to say that President Kennedy had not made up his mind about Vietnam before he was assassinated. Bundy’s assistant, Michael V. Forrestal, later told CBS in 1971 that on November 21, 1963, Kennedy had told him in the Oval Office that when he got back from Dallas, “I want to start a complete and very profound review of how we got into this country, and what we thought we were doing, and what we think we can do. I even want to think about whether or not we should be there.” This sounds like Kennedy—but this too is oral history told long after the fact. Kai Bird Kathmandu, Nepal William Pfaff replies: Mr. Bird writes as if I were the author of Mr. Goldstein’s book rather than its reviewer. It does not consist of material “collected” by Goldstein, but assembled by McGeorge Bundy himself in preparation for writing the memoir for which he engaged Mr. Goldstein’s assistance, and surely included “contemporaneous source material.” With respect to President Kennedy’s decision on escalating the Vietnam War, we are indeed dealing with “murky” (although not that murky, I would say) evidence consisting of what President Kennedy’s associates say was their opinion of his intentions in late 1963. The President’s post–Bay of Pigs distrust of “expert opinion,” his privately expressed conviction that guerrilla wars are not won by foreign troops, and his repeated referral of his associates to General Douglas MacArthur’s opinion concerning the folly of sending American troops to fight on the Asian mainland suggest that he had made up his mind before 1963 to continue to refuse to send combat forces to Vietnam, but was treading cautiously because of the domestic political situation, and the Pentagon and congressional pressures being placed upon him. Thus I prefer the relatively disinterested view of Gordon Goldstein, a historian working with Bundy’s own documents, as well as with his subsequent notes and reflections, and personally close to Bundy at the time of the latter’s death in 1996, to the opinion of Michael Forrestal, a committed hawk at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Forrestal was one of the instigators of the message sent to the Saigon embassy the weekend of August 24, 1963, apparently without the express authority of the President (away at Hyannisport), authorizing Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to encourage a military coup against the Diem government, if President Diem did not agree to dismiss his brother and close adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu. This eventually resulted in the murder of both President Diem and his brother, which apparently infuriated Kennedy. General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, subsequently described Forrestal as one of the four “anti-Diem activists” whose weekend maneuver had been an “egregious end-run.” (The lesson drawn from the affair by Bundy was cool: “Never do business on the weekend.” See Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, Viking, 1983, pp. 286–288.) It would be unsurprising if Forrestal (by 1971) had convinced himself that Kennedy intended a “profound review” of Vietnam policy following his Dallas trip, and would have decided, as Forrestal among many others recommended, to send American combat troops to Vietnam, but this is speculation, or wishful thinking. After JFK’s assassination, the same people convinced a reluctant Lyndon Johnson to do so, to the subsequent misfortune of everyone concerned. (Shortly before he died in 1989, Forrestal told one of the editors of The New York Review that he had been “all wrong” about the Vietnam War.)

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My reading of the Warren Report is that Dulles is directing the minutiae of questioning and the steering of Committee opinion more than McCloy. A hands-on performance. McCloy is big-picture and policy.

"The shame of a US General accusing a US President of being a secret supporter of the Communist Enemy is unforgivable today as it was 54 years ago." Yet Kennedy was accused of this privately, and it was ignored. Kennedy was accused of this publicly, on the eve of his killing, in the infamous "Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas" newspaper ad, yet this was swept under the rug of the national grief. In hindsight, it's a shame that the accusation wasn't made more blatantly by his enemies and answered more forcefully by Kennedy.

I'm glad, David, that you're enjoying Jeff Caufield's concentration on the resigned General Walker. Well, I'm enjoying the background on anti-communist and anti-integration groups. I'm always for throwing out the baby if the bath water's drinkable. And I know the lees of the cess should be strained through my teeth. It's a book that should be discussed, though perhaps not for the reasons you might prefer.

Interestingly, when you open the Google preview on different computers or at different times - the amount of the book viewable varies. I ended on page 65 last night, and now pp. 63-68 are missing. Maybe this is normal and I'm a dope.

Bumping this. Let me say that I'm finding Caulfield's research into the background of the southern segregationist right well worth considering, and his contention that only the right was involved in the assassination well worth contradicting. I haven't finished the excerpted material yet, but so far this seems a mixed bag worth emptying on the table. Put the onions aside - they're still good.

As I recall, Bill Miller, who used to post here, argued that Black Dog Man was Arnold. I couldn't buy it but if it's true, there's your photo. With advances in technology, it might be time for independent examination of the area in Moorman that produced the Badgeman/Hardhat/Gordon Arnold images. David, have you read Donald Phillips book "A deeper darker truth", about the work of Tom Wilson? Wilson said his computer program showed the badgeman clearly. And Gordon Arnold?

As I recall, Bill Miller, who used to post here, argued that Black Dog Man was Arnold. I couldn't buy it but if it's true, there's your photo. With advances in technology, it might be time for independent examination of the area in Moorman that produced the Badgeman/Hardhat/Gordon Arnold images.

I believe I have heard everything now.

In its exploitation of both left and right, globalism can be seen as centrist, though I agree it's right-of-center. The idea of one power structure enlisting the aid of diverse groups in carrying out the assassination might also be seen as centrist. I have no doubt that the money above the people you cite sees itself as centrist, beneficent and progressive, believing that its manipulations of groups,states and economies for profit also produces order. Much of the method is a renovation of the Great Game of empire, as established in Europe and Britain during the centuries when monarchy was enabled by banking. I think Marrs' comment is wise in the sense that the money above government was able to exploit the hate for Kennedy as an enemy of the state that was held in diverse quarters. That also solved diverse Kennedy problems: Vietnam, Soviet relations, the Middle East, anti-colonialism, nuclear testing, steel, oil, and - at the vulgar level - US race relations.and tolerance of Castro's Cuba.

Um...if I recall, Dan Rather's identification of where he was during the assassination moments has come under question before, and he has been accused of an untruth on this point before. People may want to search the past threads on this forum for more information.

Jim Marrs, in Crossfire, said an intelligent thing, and perhaps a useful thing: that JFK was killed not by a right-wing action, nor by a left-wing action, but by a centrist action, because of a coalescence of interests.

I wouldn't be surprised, Steven, if Walker was less involved than he thought he was, per the comments made by Gerry Hemming and others over the years that many groups contributed money and what they thought was influence to the assassination - giving a dark twist to Kennedy's pronouncement that success has a thousand fathers. The proof of the pudding is in Walker's decline into obscurity and irrelevance. He couldn't keep the Dallas police away from him when he committed his public morals offenses, and couldn't maintain avenues of expression that would keep him from committing them. It was a sad decline from the boss jock he was when fame and power put a coterie of young men at his bidding. His fury at RFK for the rumor that he shielded Oswald from Dallas police when Oswald supposedly shot at him was an early confession of his increasing powerlessness. He got the POTUS killed but himself declined to these states of affairs, and ended up this friendless? In some ways, Walker's decline was one of the minor triumphs of the Kennedy political legacy, and in others an effect of the Globalist social agenda that really got Kennedy killed.

5) The Ruby matter is announced as "another peculiarity." For contextual understanding, we ought to know the peculiarities Walker discussed previous to this excerpt. The matter above "Walker's warning" would be useful to see, if only to be dismissed as non-contextual.

One recalls Meyer Lansky's quip about organized crime: "We're bigger than US Steel." Not for nothing, as they say?