David Andrews

Well, to accept Russo's self-advertisements - coming from a guy who escaped incarceration by claiming the eight men he shot were shot in self defense - is to accept his tale that Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger in partnership with Frank Costello. I don't mind, but when I quoted Gore Vidal here saying the same things, Vidal's statements were dismissed as lies and jealousy toward the Kennedys. I deleted Russo's book from my hard drive after reading, but one tale I remember is that the Mob demanded that Peter Lawford bring JFK, RFK and father Joe Kennedy to the Cal-Neva lodge for a summit on the Mob prosecutions. The prize would be to film both younger Kennedys in flagrante with Marilyn Monroe. According to Russo, only Lawford showed, bringing stroke victim Joe Kennedy in a wheelchair. This was alleged to have happened during Monroe's famous Cal-Neva sojourn in July 1962 (ten days before her death) when she suffered some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of Sam Giancana and Frank Sinatra - an event supposedly captured on film. Problems with the Russo story arise: Lawford was persona non grata with Cal-Neva co-owner Sinatra since March 1962, over JFK's declination to stay at Sinatra's Palm Springs home. And while Joe Kennedy is said to have been using a wheelchair by August 1962, it is unlikely he would make a cross-country trip, especially with only Lawford as attendant. I suspect that when James Caan kicked Russo too hard, he had his reasons.

Ron -- For your listening pleasure:

'Not believable?' Really? What part? -- David Ferrie to Jim Garrison, JFK

David Talbot, author of The Devil's Chessboard and Brothers, writes about recovering from his stroke in Between Heaven and Hell: https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/i-felt-my-boundariesi-had-shrunk-david-talbot-on-post-stroke-existentialism/

Paulie sold out the old man, that strunz'. I don't wanna see him again. -- Sonny Corleone https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=strun

I read it , the guy's a strunz'.

Just a stray thought: Mentioned in another thread recently was the fact that a pair of flip-flops was included among Oswald's possessions recovered from the Paine house. Back in the day, flip-flops were also known as "shower shoes." People who wouldn't wear them on the street sometimes wore them when showering in communal facilities, such as at a YMCA, to avoid catching Athlete's Foot and other diseases. Obviously this can't be made to point at any specific place or time, and Oswald may have owned these because of the vagaries of his housing situation. But I don't see Oswald as a streetwear flip-flop type.

You really need to balance one doc against the other. Watch the first one I posted, then the second.

A great video debate between Roy Cohn and Gore Vidal, in which each tries to out the other. Excellent TV on several counts, intelligence foremost: Whoever thought he would miss the mind of Roy Cohn?

Just look at that damn head. He looks like the Incas bound it to flat boards as a baby.

I suspect KGB ran a double-game on Angleton, in which Golitsyn and Nosenko were each false defectors, tying up CIA in internal squabbles and leading to Angleton's retirement by Colby. Whichever of their moles had to be sacrificed to establish Golitsyn's bona fides were pawns in a cynical greater game. If Nosenko had to suffer, KGB gambled that we wouldn't kill a defector even if perceived as false. If the views of the second Harold Wilson documentary above bear any credence, KGB may have run a similarly confounding game in England, harassing Wilson and MI5 each into paranoia about the other, knowing also that MI5 had a strong line to Angleton.

Roger Stone and his big, planar, polyhedral head on Roy Cohn and Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTfOVmukqYA

I knew John Simkin had had a Harold Wilson thread, but when I searched it and replied with the post above, I didn't notice that it wasn't in the JFKA Debate section. Thanks, James, and apologies. Nonetheless, that's a good Harold Wilson documentary linked above, and it relates to Angleton-era covert action and the spectre of military coups against Left-leaning governments, so it should be of interest to the JFKA Debate. Do scroll up and check it out. Here's another view of the Wilson-KGB-MI5-CIA nexus, apologetically calling it paranoia on Wilson's part. But watch the documentary posted above first. Warning - contains commercials: If the Golitsyn-Nosenko defections were a master plot by KGB to confound and embarrass CIA through Angleton, KGB may have also harassed Harold Wilson in order to raise his undesirable status at MI5 and CIA.

Pacino's late renaissance was roughly 1995 to 2002, when his acting style was as top-notch as his defiant hairstyle and his dark-on-dark wardrobe. It's too bad that not all the films were of the quality of Heat and Glengarry Glen Ross. In Insomnia, he was so into the title condition that I chucked "suspension of disbelief" out the window, worrying he was going to have a heart attack soon. His last best role was Roy Cohn in Angels in America (2003, HBO), including this scene in which Cohn's doctor - James Cromwell, holding up his end admirably - tells him he has AIDS. It's one of the greatest moments in television, and a marker of how far television had come since Pacino's youth. Rough language below: I saw Roy Cohn for a couple of minutes in the early 1980s, gladhanding an adoring crowd before making a graduation address at NYU, and I'll say it's no slur for him to be played by Pacino. The slurs came, also in crowds, when Cohn was disbarred. Pacino should have brought some of this ruthless edge to his Hoffa, who comes off a little hangdog on screen, and in the script as well. Scorsese ought to have called Tony Kushner in for a screenplay polish. The Steve Zaillian script for Irishman soft-pedals Hoffa's hatred for the Kennedys, which might have emerged in scenes like Kushner's below while keeping moments sympathetic to Hoffa in his out-of-the-office scenes with De Niro and his screen family. Scorsese's audience isn't so simple minded that it couldn't reconcile the two sides of Hoffa. More rough language:

Well, I was making a joke, but, yeah, that bit in Godfather II is pretty great, where Pacino first rubs his forehead like he's been hit with a sudden migrane, then buries his face in his hands in horror: business-as-usual with Fredo turns apocalyptic. It's especially effective because it's behind Fredo's back, just like the gun that will later kill him. In a crap movie like Godfather III, Pacino's Edvard Munch-like silent scream at the end is also one of the best things.

LOL 😋😂😃 Funniest comment since DVP left I hope you're getting the jokes here, son. -- Foghorn Leghorn

I disagree. Al's head-toss reaction when Joe Pesci tells him that the Mob feels he's being ungrateful was his most Hoffa-like moment, and the most original acting move he's pulled in decades. Well worth sitting through the whole performance for, and I think Academy members perceived it that way as well. In contrast, Bening hardly moved her head at all, even though her Feinstein hairdo was lacquered in place. Shows a lack of ambition unseemly in an older actress.

Joker is going to have to rest on its nominations, because the Academy can't be seen supporting gun violence. There'll be technical and design award wins, but they'll have to be split with 1917, which will cop Best Cinematography. Scorsese is getting Best Director, as that has been in the payola cards all along. Irishman is probably getting Best Adapted Screenplay, because the gun violence is historical and is spread over several characters, as also in 1917. I'm surprised there was no sentimental Best Actor nomination for De Niro, though only the last 45 minutes of Irishman merited it. Though Joe Pesci deserves it, they'll give Brad Pitt Best Supporting Actor on sentimental grounds, mostly for taking off his shirt at 50. This may be a year where they'll throw a lot of bronze at women's films and family films: Marriage Story, Little Women, Parasite. Parasite has violence issues, but they'll judge that OK, because it's not American, and there's no accounting for foreigners in the American mind. (Compared to Joker's lone-gunman scenario, this is violence you wouldn't see in an American Oscar nominee: if they rebooted Parasite in America, they'd stick Jennifer Aniston in it.) One signal of the women-family win axis is that Zellweger's a shoo-in for Judy. Another is that, in years of violent nominees, and blah nominees, the Academy has gone all distaff-pastoral on us before. There's an internet legend that the payola is in for Leo's second Oscar, and that this was the only reason he agreed to play an actor on the skids in OUATIH. On merit, it should go to Joaquin Phoenix, whose #metoo problems haven't quite surfaced yet. However, if Joker wins Best Picture, the end of civilization is signaled, and our next president will be the Emperor Heliogabalus.

Bump test

Kennedy/CIA related: Swell documentary about how defector Anatoliy Golitsyn convinced James Angleton that British PM Harold Wilson was a KGB plant installed after Hugh Gaitskell was supposedly assassinated, and how Wilson's two governments (ending 1970 and 1976) each almost went down in military coups backed by the royals: All I can say is, if England was so rattled by the Soviets, the labor unions and the IRA in the 1960s and 1970s, then it must have made a sweetheart deal with the US in order to survive Brexit unruffled. Perhaps, however, this is a portrait of paranoia and hyperactivity in the later Cold War, and (unintentionally) of brilliant unconcern for the dangers of abandoning the EU.

Delete, please

Don't forget that that narrow Camp David agreement got Anwar Sadat killed. Folks are sensitive down there.

How much of that agenda do we feel has been accomplished, being that the five years shortly after 9/11 were contained within the GWB administration? Who's driving the extended version of this plan across succeeding administrations? I count Syria and Libya, though neither effort has been complete, or produced a kingdom peaceable to the west.

Well, Olson was dropped out a window, if you believe Eric Olson and Seymour Hersh in the docudrama Wormwood. I might almost say that Forrestal jumped, because he probably did want to end his life -- but go look at your own bathrobe. If you knotted the cord around your neck, would there be enough length left to tie to a radiator and hang yourself by jumping out a window? And who in government office would want to make that splashy an exit, dangling out a Bethesda tower window in front of God and President Truman and everybody? Seems unseemly for a man reading Sophocles just before the plunge. Monsignor Sheehy said that when he hurried to the hospital several hours after Forrestal hurtled to his death to try to learn what he could of the circumstances of the tragedy, a stranger approached him in the crowded hospital corridor. The man was a hospital corpsman [...] a warrant officer wearing stripes attesting to twenty years of service in the navy. He said to Monsignor Sheehy in a low, tense voice: 'Father...you know Mr. Forrestal didn't kill himself, don't you.' But before Monsignor Sheehy could reply or ask the man's name, he said, others in the crowded corridor pressed about him closely, and the veteran warrant officer, as if fearful of being overheard, quickly disappeared. David Martin's book speaks a lot about ways that a concerted effort might have been made in govt. and media to paint Forrestal as more disturbed than he was. The trouble is there's a lot of smoke obscuring the fire, and even the Monsignor Sheehy incident is hearsay. David Martin on Trump. the Mob and the CIA: http://dcdave.com/article5/160310.htm