David Andrews

I hope there's some useful work and some food for investigation. Reading the author bio is encouraging re: the persistance of the the assassination's importance to succeeding generations of Americans. (At least, I give the author the benefit of the doubt until reading.)

John, I enjoyed the .pdf file on the "isolationists" very much. In your research, what is the history of the FBI following the postwar activities and regroupings of the former Bundists, Silver Shirts, Coughlinites, and America Firsters, absent their joining any race hate groups? Was there any other type of FBI involvement with pro-fascist groups, such as in anti-communist alliances? I've read your many past posts and the history of your research personae up to 1963 and the assassination coverup, but I'm wondering about the movement history from the FBI angle. Anything I should read in that line? I'm as interested in the rank-and-file Americans who fell for this volksfascismus as much as I am in the leadership and its useful idiots.

Deleted. Apologies.

Double ironic post - sorry.

Thanks, Duncan - and a bump.

I watched Waco: Rules of Engagement. You only get a glimpse of Sonny Bono wiping tears from his eyes. There's footage where Sonny is a Congressman and he's grilling Janet Reno No way - in Waco, Sonny is visible in the upper background - head in hands, mouth agape - while Schumer rants on, for a long couple of minutes, like some character out of The Godfather, Pt. II who imagines he's a Roman senator. Some of the shots almost look like they're framed to catch Sonny behind Schumer, but it was either accident or on-the-fly opportunity. The scene was one of my favorite things in the picture. If you missed Sonny back there, you were mesmerized by Schumer.

The only person to be punished in the whole case history.

I'm for Swearingen, but I'm also for anyone who can add any experience, criticism, or investigation of the Bureau in its last two decades. I recently read Top Secret, and it's tempting to generalize some attitudes and institutional behaviors over to these decades...but it's also sometimes like being The Men Who Stare at Goats. Need modern FBI coverage to bridge the years between Watergate and 9/11. Assassination purists might see it otherwise.

Hunt down The Panama Deception. It has some bracing footage on the use of non-conventional weapons on the slums of Panama City, for purposes of urban renewal.

I'd like to see work like this done at Waterloo, or Pearl Harbor, instead of CGI plottings. Nice if it could be done with period B/W stills of a scene.

The footage of Sonny at the Waco hearings is in the very watchable documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement. The icing on the cake of the film's presentation is Sonny, watching in open-mouthed indignation from the gallery while Sen. Charles Schumer of New York pours out a dumbfounding spiel of lies and hypocrisy on the government's handling of the assault. It's an image of politics as corrupt as any fictional drama could portray it. The film also features the very rich guy who invented infra-red imaging for the government, showing every point in the surveillance footage where the government lied about its actions during the siege. BTW, people who like well-made documentaries like this should look up The Panama Deception, narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery, a deliberate and careful film on the invasion.

Really nice, thank you - like the slope of a great battlefield. It can look as eerie as Little Big Horn Hill. Congratulations to the photographer.

I threw in my two cents as to Joe Kennedy within the "context" of the assassination. Just because they appeared subsequent to Jim Di's opinion upon another context doesn't mean I intended to contradict Jim, nor overrule his contribution. I believe that Joe left Jack alone. But I also put forth that Joe stood as a sort of symbolic guarantor of JFK's being on the same page as the people who later opposed him - only some of whom held office, all of whom were Not Nice. And sitting back and chortling while those types were discommoded was quite the Joe Kennedy style. It was in the style of his enemies to shoot his sons in the face and in the back. I have a rough working weekend ahead of me, but I'll be back on the topic of Joe and on the family's mob ties, because I don't believe one should sentimentalize the people or things one loves. Especially when we love them for their dangerous games.

Jim, I appreciate your well-made points. Kennedy has been referred to as a liberal pragmatist, in the sense that he saw the motions toward national self-determination that were not only encouraged by FDR's anti-imperial vision of the post-war world, but were emerging sui generis in response to the liberation of Europe and Asia, just as they had emerged at the Versailles conference (including through uninvited representatives in 1919, such as Ho Chi Minh). Nonetheless - Kennedy got into power, beating Humphrey, Johnson, and Symington for the nomination, and then beating Nixon, to a great degree because of the money and influence his father commanded. And with Joe's command also went, tacitly or overtly, Joe's imprimatur, the guarantee that a defiant liberalism would not be an issue in his candidate son. Surely this swayed Joe's old mob ties, already besmirched by JFK and RFK's committee action in the 1950s, and made the alliances in the mob for the brothers that even the CIA/Nixon-forged liaisons over Cuba could not have caused them to inherit. Surely Joe's presence helped sway the personalities for whom JFK had to appear more anti-Castro than Nixon in the debates. The extent to which JFK deviated from what was predicted by his supporters and foes is the extent to which he deviated from what his old man's money and character seemed to guarantee. Joe was both a facilitator and a guarantor. He was a kind of demon of cronyism and dealmaking, lechery and betrayal, greed and superiority, that allowed JFK and RFK to rise as far as they did among various establishments. His death may have helped guarantee JFK's fall. As the substance of your two-part article on the emergence of Kennedy smears in the press since the 1970s shows, the research community needs to discover the origins of canards, misrepresentations, and lies about Kennedy crime ties and sex scandals, and weed these out. But at the end of the day, old Joe will still droop over the moral landscape like a poison tree, and his influence is the one that most of all will need to be evaluated, if only to prove how far the apples actually rolled from the branch. Even Jim Douglass was unable to go as deeply into Joe as Joe demands of us, though someone will have to. I posted not in contradiction of your fine post, but merely to amplify this unfading, sour note in the threnody. It has to be dealt with, and it's part of what you called for yourself in the anti-smear article.

One could argue that Kennedy's father made him president in more than one way: the past influence and presumed continuing influence of the old player would have done as much to sell the son as the ballot shenanigans did. The December 19, 1961 stroke that left Joe speechless and motionless - coming only a few months after the BOP and the firing of Dulles - surely queered the sense of parental management relied upon by the old man's cronies in the eastern establishment and the mob. It cast JFK as indubuitably his own man, thus helping estrange him from the trust and cooperation of the powerful.

While Andrew Johnson's administration angered radical Republicans who - in the years just after the Civil War - were still committed to African-American rights and what we would later call a "desegregated" South, at the time of Lincoln's assassination Johnson of Tennessee was looked on as a turncoat to the South and an enemy of slavery. It s probable that Booth was surveilling Johnson at his hotel, for assassination later by the timid and not too bright Atzerodt, who abandoned the attempt.

Actually...I kind of liked it, Ray. It made me feel like Paul Krassner at the old Realist magazine.

Thank you Glenn - You made my morning.

I don't know anything about JFK's "Double," but I'm learning more every day. Gary Mack seems to think it important enough to correct the missimpression I gave everyone with my wrong description of what he said. Since I still don't understand exactly what he means, I will give you his exact words: I did NOT say or imply what you said I did: Gary Mack says that JFK didn't have an official double, but that one agent looked just like him. I explained that one of the agents who visited Brennan must have looked very much like JFK and Brennan assumed he was a double. Please correct your post. Thanks, Gary Confidentiality Notice: This message may contain confidential information and is intended only for the named recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not disclose, forward, distribute, use or copy this email or its contents. If you are not the named addressee, please notify the sender immediately by return email that you have received this email by mistake and delete this email from your system. Consider it corrected. http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Transcript_of_Milteer-Somersett_Tape SOMERSETT: Well how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him? MILTEER: From an office building with a high-powered rifle, how many people [room noise--tape not legible] does he have going around who look just like him? Do you know about that? SOMERSETT: No, I never heard that he had anybody. MILTEER: He has got them. SOMERSETT: He has? MILTEER: He has about fifteen. Whenever he goes any place they [not legible] he knows he is a marked man. + + + I can see how this would be open to several interpretations, including Milteer's paranoia -- David

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When I remember how the lead singer told the press how she turned Mick Jagger down repeatedly while the groups toured together...let's just say it brings up an inevitable dimension to the statement, "Kennedy would have loved this band." I'm surprised he allows death to make it conditional.

The possibility of more than one double for JFK is raised in the Joseph Milteer surveillance audio tape, yes? Not that Milteer knew of this beyond the level of rumor.

It should have read: "Interesting how the assassination is timed so that a 'communist' can shoot the president on everybody's lunch hour..." Where I wanted to go with this is that the whitewash story was that Every Good American vacated the sixth floor at lunch to go see the president drive by, giving a wily "commie" his opportunity to strike.

For Oswald to "ready the trap" a number of things must occur... - rifle is assembled - Sniper's lair is built - Noone is on the 6th floor between 11:55 and 12:30 - witnesses do NOT see multiple men, in different windows, sporting rifles at 12:15 - Oswald is NOT in the 2nd floor lunchroom at 12:15 or as late as 12:25 - Oswald knows when the limo would pass by so as to have the time to "ready the trap" Interesting how the assassination is timed so that a communist can shoot the president on everybody's lunch hour...

This is among the questions I'd be putting to somebody who saw a different "Zapruder."