David Andrews

Is there a photo of the crates? I've heard about them for years but never seen them. If you can't post a photo, post a link, please. Also, what's with the rifle in the plainclothesman's hand, by the window at 01:57 in this assemblage of the Alyea film?

Andrej -- as either direct analog or as metaphor, I believe your "psychic detective" trope covers a number of personalities we're familiar with in assassination and 9/11 studies.

BTW: When you dump JVB you dump Haslam too. They are in the same boat. Karl - That's fine with me. Haslam has had years to research and establish the identity and find the photograph of the Tulane visiting professor who inveigled her way into his life under the name "Judyth Vary Baker," and he has not. I've worked at universities and attended a few, and I know very well that schools go out of their way to photograph their visiting faculty and use their CVs as publicity to attract students and funding, and even future faculty job candidates. It's not stretching the truth to say that publicity is what visiting faculty are all about, including their role in working with other faculty . Even if this femme fatale of Haslam's largely escaped the ritual because she was some deep cover job trolling for impressionable students, there has to be some institutional record of her to trace at Tulane. Nobody's doing that, including Haslam. Any takers for this research task in the NOLA area?

For an analog, people should look at the 2006 film of All The King's Men, also adapted by Steve Zaillian and directed by him. I'll check in later with some comments on The Irishman. Do read that article posted above, on surveillance in the Hoffa age, and now,

Jimmy Hoffa, Chuckie O'Brien, and government surveillance: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/jimmy-hoffa-my-stepfather-and-me/598372/ Written by Chuckie's stepson, a former DoJ attorney. Discusses the Kennedys and King.

My grandmother, a proud Polish-American family woman, loved The Godfather for its heimisch ethos. Watching The Irishman tonight, I could hear her yelling "Give it to him!" when De Niro stomped the guy who touched his daughter. As if these things don't happen.

It did become a strange ethno-cultural war between Gallo and the Mob, one of its two climaxes being Gallo hiring or otherwise convincing a black assassin to shoot down Mob boss Joe Columbo at an Italian-American pride rally at Columbus Circle in New York, at the height of Columbo's strident defense of Italian-American heritage against Mafia stereotyping. At bottom may have been Gallo's insistent sense that he and his brothers were slighted by New York's Mob hierarchy when the Gallos made war against the Profaci-Columbo family they had once served. Columbo's protests affected the making of The Godfather, which never utters the words Mafia or Cosa Nostra. NB that the Gallos are rumored to have been hired to shoot Albert Anastasia in the Park Sheraton Hotel barber shop, though they are not name-checked when this scene occurs, with splendid art direction, in The Irishman. In 1976, when Bob Dylan rehashed Joe Gallo's life story in the bathetic folk ballad "Joey," rock critic Lester Bangs delivered all Gallo hagiographers the death blow, recounting how Gallo once ripped an album by Dylan associates The Byrds off his wife's stereo and threw it down the apartment building's trash chute, calling the Byrds "fags." https://www.villagevoice.com/1976/03/08/dylan-dallies-with-mafia-chic-joey-gallo-was-no-hero/

HSCA testimony of Loran Hall, 180-10118-1025, pp. 2-139 -- 2-140: Hall on JFK assassination plans: "I even had some kook who was going to devise -- he was a medical student and he was going to have -- oh, Christ, a culture, but it was all bullxxxx." https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=60423#relPageId=142&tab=page

Marty's optioned the Judyth Vary Baker story to get a jump on Oliver Stone.

Were you crushed as well as disappointed?

They need to create a new chain of existing theaters in NYC.

The Irishman now streaming on Netflix!

I'm not even sure I'm right. I'd like to listen from the start with a pair of headphones, to get a feel for the context, and decipher all the unintelligible grumblings. The "Tom Huston Plan" is, on the surface, more associated with Sullivan than Felt.

Thanks again, Malcolm and Bart. For students of Bugliosi, is it reading too much into things to note that the letter from the House that cites Curt Gentry, says he "wrote Helter Skelter"?

EDIT The tape seems to say that Mark Felt wants to "f***ing kill Sullivan" to keep him from becoming head of the FBI, which Nixon seems to support despite his hatred of Felt for leaking to the press. Haldeman argues that Sullivan (or Felt?) is a "Tom Houston" kind of guy, and "emotional in the right way"? (c. 0:19.00) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huston_Plan NB that Sullivan outlived the Nixon admin (and Hoover), having his hunting accident in 1977.

The grandfather and grandmother of AIDS origin docs and polio vaccine contamination, presented without endorsement:

True dat. No snaps with white scalloped edges. The cancer thing would never make it past American production companies, precisely because of the anti-vaxx thing. They should have made Oswald's Women in 1967, with Frank Sinatra as Oswald, Rita Hayworth as Marita Lorenz, Mia Farrow as Judy Baker, Brad Dexter as Frank Sturgis, Lawrence Harvey as both Castro and Kennedy, William Holden as David Atlee Phillips, Peter Falk as David Ferrie, Judy Garland as Dr. Mary Sherman, Werner Klemperer as Dr. Alton Ochsner, and Kim Novak as Marina.

Working title: Oswald's Women. I hate to say it, but there is something like cinematic potential in Baker's Me and Lee - especially that Cancun holiday, with Lee and Judy rolling in the surf like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. But the cancer angle is a potential buzzkill. Note who gets the superior pronoun in Baker's book title. It says a lot, and that ordering would never fly at a major publishing house, where it would come out as Lee and Me.

People who are duplicitous often speak in double-meanings out of hubris, perhaps mixed with the strange thrill of covert confession. I have to ask again: What was Dean up to, and why, when he told Nixon, [paraphrase], "We don't know where to get a million in hush money. We're not criminals or the Mafia"? And then, of course, like some corrupt, small-town mayor, Dick bit at the bait, on tape. Not since Othello took the handkerchief from Iago.... Len Colodny says there were multiple tapes discussing the cover-up with Dean that have gone unheard - some worse than this, the "Smoking Gun." It was early in the history of wiretapping, but Nixon's naivete in believing that tapes the president made himself would not be heard by others and discussed with a special prosecutor is in the realm of the fantastic. I thought there was a Rose Garden for conversations like this.

He believes her. But he's not going to spend money on her.

"Hans Kraus, JFK’s New York–based orthopedic surgeon, told Kennedy in December 1962: 'No president with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that.'" -- Another reason to value Kennedy's rationality. Can Dr. Max Jacobson be linked to MKULTRA?

Could that knowledge be, "Fire me and make an example of me before you start the cover-up, because I instigated the break-in over my fiancee's call girl ring"?

I feel the scene in Oliver Stone's Nixon, where John Dean (David Hyde-Pierce) meets Hunt (Ed Harris) on the Potomac bridge, rather misrepresents Hunt as well. Hunt's TV interviews were available long before YouTube, and there's no reason for an actor to play him off-target. Dean is misrepresented throughout Nixon as an innocent do-gooder. The more I listen to interviews with Len Colodny, Ray Locker and Geoff Shepard (on Midnight Writer News), the more Watergate as portrayed in Nixon looks skewed, like history in a D. W. Griffith film. This doesn't stop me from liking Nixon and watching it, or parts of it, once a year, lately -- but other films have gotten a thrashing here for about as much distortion.

Next time, I'm just going to write, "FRIST!"

That camera's been up for a few years now. The night view is really rather peaceful and hypnotic, perhaps comforting upon one's deathbed.