David Andrews

Ah, well...we've all had long acquaintance with Lifton, whether we've met him or not. He seems to have been the type of writer who throws out unsupported hypotheses, then walks them back or discards them when they prove obviously unsustainable in print. If you don't publish, then you're judged by these wishful attempts at retaining currency. The old Yiddish proverb, Never show half-work to fools, applies. For myself, I've shortened it to Never show half-work, ever, which can also leave you, like DSL, with nothing to stand on should circumstances intervene. Lifton seems to have fixated on reverse-engineering the JFKA events in order to discover how the plot and its execution worked. He seems to put too much faith in later finding supporting documentary evidence, because the technique had worked for him before. But the more baroque his horological design becomes, the less prone the gears are to mesh. It's possible that knowing the marketplace thrives on sensationalist Greer-did-it books, and tales of mercury-tainted blood drops left on JFK's watch, contributed to Lifton's recklessness. But God love him for what he did do, did research and collect, and has left behind.

Ah, no. The remarks seem to take place in the context of dismissing the Greer-shot-JFK trope. Lifton clearly describes his concept of the original plan. Too much tar on the brush here.

I listened to the 14 videos while doing other tasks. At one or two points, Lifton mentions that another SS agent, and not Greer, drove the limo "from Dealey to Parkland." Did anyone better catch how that supposedly went down?

It was becoming, um, overused here.

More than 70% of voters in poll want Biden to release secret JFK assassination records (NBC News) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/more-than-70-of-voters-in-poll-want-biden-to-release-jfk-assassination-records/ar-AA14XXad?cvid=8c5bc26e3945491784f6acfcd4da0207

She looks like she's recovering from being hit in the face with a shovel.

Great avatar pic, Joe.

If Lee was so brutal, why didn't he beat Marina after she locked him in to keep him from assassinating Nixon? Did he think it was adorable, like Ricky Ricardo?

Ouch!

Any connection to Marina's statement that she locked LHO in the bathroom to keep him from assassinating RMN? Boy, that LA Times story is really beneath Reston, Jr. He may have had an underselling book to flog.

It was his "Lefty Lee" deep cover role, and he played it to the hilt, until the blade was buried in his chest. Once made the patsy, he probably felt that continuity would impress the US intelligence community,* and save him - considering that this imposture would scare the Soviets to death. The only time he broke the fourth wall was in protesting too loudly that Ruth Paine was innocent, then hinting that "now everybody will know who I am" (paraphrase). That would call attention to each of their roles, in a sub rosa appeal to the DPD for some abetment of his role-playing, and an abatement of the pressure on him. Did DPD upchannel those remarks, and get Oswald killed? (Probably they didn't: his death was in the cards all along.) Really, a strategy similar to Jack Ruby presenting himself to Earl Warren as a holder of secrets, masked in a crazy act for the benefit of Dallas police and Sheriff Bill Decker that he hoped Warren would see through. Perhaps both Oswald and Ruby believed that the fix that was in was not universally supported above the local level. ________ *"'Intelligence community?' Jesus, you guys are kind to yourselves." -- Three Days of the Condor

Thank you! Maybe the transcript can be donated to a JFKA collection.

Joe, I didn't notice, and wasn't correcting. I was just unexpectedly seized by Kim Farber fever this morning, a disorder that hasn't reappeared since my pre-adolescence. No cures, please.

William, Joe - Kim Farber and Mark Lane in the February 1967 issue: https://archive.org/details/youtube-rjEfn_qFCJE The Nancy Kulp issue is, unfortunately for comedy, MIA.

Somehow, I don't think the Azov battalion will be dispensed with as quickly and finally as in the days when Hitler could take down Ernst Rohm and the SA in one night, without interference. Their domestic and international supporters will live on the internet until renascence. And live on within foreign governments, as with Gladio.

It's a simple fix, Ed - go search the Tulane University archives for a picture of that visiting professor. Start online. See if she used the JVB name, or another. If you can't find her, tell us that.

Was Oz's supposed exhibitionism later set up with the story that, on returning from Russia, he was disappointed in the lack of press turnout?

One very good book on the SF music scene is Joel Selvin's Summer of Love (1994), which is out of print but can be found through a library: https://www.amazon.com/Summer-Love-Inside-Story-Times/dp/0525936750/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=Joel+Selvin&link_code=qs&qid=1668168869&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-7&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.f5122f16-c3e8-4386-bf32-63e904010ad0 The two other Selvin books I've read (Grateful Dead, Altamont) have been of the same standards. I hope everybody understands that I linked to the McGowan pages "for entertainment purposes only." I can't see getting all bug-eyed over his set of assumptions, only the topics for further research within.

Who was it that called Morrison an erotic politician? The noun may have been less developed than the adjective. God bless him, though, for what he got across, sometimes wonderfully off-handedly. Where would Coppola be without him?

I have to tell you, Ron - I skimmed the McGowan pages I linked to, and I think that the version I read on his own site while McGowan was alive was a revised edition, longer and better written. I don't remember that version ending where this one does. I haven't read the book he made from his articles, but the published work *may* be a more complete read. McGowan's stuff often falls into the "Everybody was guilty" fallacy of conspiracy fabula. For instance, McGowan asks, portentiously, why Jim Morrison never mentioned that his father, the admiral, was (supposedly) instrumental in assaulting North Vietnam. A simple answer might be, He was effin' embarrassed to acknowledge it, and not in on a cover-up. Or he didn't want the bad press in the counterculture media. Or - being Jim Morrison, lost in a Roman wilderness of liquor bottles - he really didn't give an eff.

Entertaining as they are, McGowan's pages require fact-checking by the reader. I have a Zappa biography I can dig out to see if Gottleib is mentioned in connection with FZ's dad, and other delights. It's possible that McGowan's thesis boils down to this: To get a major label contract in LA, it helped to have a daddy who was rich or connected. I don't want to write his work off totally: it has research-worthy topics and tidbits. BTW, if you check online, you may still find McGowan's series on the Lincoln assassination. It's been a long time since I've read it, but I did think enough of it to save a copy...somewhere among my 20-plus hard drives. (I'm still looking for Rich Dellarosa's now-deleted pages on the MLK assassination, which I promised another inmate here, years ago.)

Dave McGowan passed away some time ago. His pre-publication article series on Laurel Canyon rock stars and MKULTRA is still kicking here: http://www.whale.to/b/inside_the_lc1.html An interesting, if dubiously factual, companion to Tom O'Neill's Chaos, thought provoking amid the BS.

And Ferrie might have hoped to impress Whalen with knowledge uncommon to the period.

One observation: If Michael really did call Ruth and say, "We both know who is responsible," he's parroting an American accusative formulation commonly heard in period movie dialogue. An utterance spoken when someone in a stressful situation wants to make a sharp point tacitly and dramatically, using a common, cinema-inspired, shared dialect. A: I know who's responsible. B: And you know who's responsible. 😄 Because it's you. (The accidental Smiley works well here, no?) In Ruth's case, we might infer, "It's you, and people you know." Because you know who's responsible, and I know that you know. Anybody who's seen a couple of Joan Crawford or Lana Turner movies speaks this dialect. The line could have come from the last act of some Bogart picture. The listener is always implicitly the accused. It might not have been true. Michael might have minimized his own involvement. And we don't even know that it happened. Yet the person who reported this utterance, and the persons who passed it down through legend, also would have understood this formulation. It's such a familiar formulation, we might wonder if it had been purposely leaked, even if untrue...

Or Ferrie could have lied about Oswald, since no one would want to jump into Oswald's role.