John Simkin

Well, we had better figure this one out, because (speaking of maddening things) the last time Mr. Simkin put up one of these blind items, he never gave the answer when nobody could suss it out.

Please let me know what that was and I will let you know the answer. I will give you the answer to this question later on today.

Abe Fortas?

He was much more important to his career than Abe Fortas. The clue is in the fact that he did not talk to LBJ.

One of the biggest funders of the Texas Observer was Bernard Rapoport, a very wealthy philanthropist and businessman out of Waco. Rapoport was an "early and close supporter of Lyndon Johnson." I have long wondered if the influence of Rapoport, his close ties to LBJ, corrupted or "silenced" the coverage of the Texas Observer of the JFK assassination.

Ronnie Dugger and the Texas Observer basically did NOTHING on the JFK assassination especially in the early years. Dugger wrote a milquetoast book on LBJ - nothing compared to Caro's early works. Lyndon Johnson even granted Dugger an interview in the White House when LBJ was president; LBJ pulled out a photo of Box 13 (symbol of the Duval County voting fraud that secured LBJ the 1948 Democratic nomination over Coke Stevenson) and just grinned silently.

It has to be understood that in the 1950s the Democratic Party in Texas was split between the progressives led by Ralph Yarborough and the traditionalists (called Shivercrats). The Republicans were not a factor and the important elections were the primaries. LBJ had been a progressive in the 1930s and had been their candidate against Coke Stevenson in 1948. LBJ won what is now believed to have been stolen from Stevenson by ballot rigging.

The progressives were furious when once in the Senate, LBJ supported the conservatives. In 1949 Johnson mounted a smear campaign against Leland Olds, chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Olds had managed to lower the prices of electricity. This upset Johnson's friends in the Texas oil industry. As Robert Bryce, the author of Cronies: Oil, The Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate (2004) pointed out: "Johnson saw that the best way to take care of Olds was to brand him a Communist. In the 1920s, Olds had worked for a wire service, and during that time he'd praised some aspects of the system of government in Russia." Olds was forced to resign. Dugger pointed out that by joining in the political crucifixion of Leland Olds - driving in the nails himself - Johnson had used most of the tricks of what would come to be known as McCarthyism, and he nauseated some of his colleagues, but he had achieved his purpose - he had convinced the oilmen back in Texas that he was their man."

Dugger pointed out that he had been on the left of the Democratic Party until coming under the influence of Herman Brown and George R. Brown. "The alliance (of Brown & Root and Johnson) became common knowledge as his political identity changed from left to right before everyone's eyes." Johnson later told Dugger when he said: "I never recommended them for a contract in my life. They never asked me to do anything for them." Dan Briody, the author of The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money (2004), wrote that "when Johnson told reporters that he had never recommended Brown & Root for a contract in his life, he was lying."

In 1954 the progressives started the Texas Observer and made Dugger their editor. Dugger later recalled: "Texas in 1954 had no big-city daily newspaper in which one could sense freedom of conscience. A group of us decided to build The Texas Observer into an independent liberal weekly paper that would introduce freedom of conscience into the press of the state. From the first I sought to practice journalism according to three basic standards, accuracy, fairness instead of objectivity, and moral seriousness. We were a tiny group, running on a shoestring, and we lost money at once and for the next 44 years. But we found and told a lot of stories that would have been lost, and somehow together we made a go of it."

Dugger campaigned against racism in Texas: "One day in 1955, a subscriber in East Texas phoned me that he had read a two-inch story in his area daily that somebody had driven through a little country town for blacks only, shooting bullets. I went out there and got the story. Bullets slammed into a schoolbus and houses, landing around a woman who was kneeling at her bed saying her nightly prayers, plugging into a café, killing a boy of 16 and injuring two younger girls who had been dancing together. The publicity led to a trial and to Southern justice for one of the two young white men who had done it, (guilty, five years suspended); no trial at all for the other one. But the story was told, and 50 years later is part of the memorialized history of East Texas."

Dugger also investigated the corruption of LBJ but was never able to accumulate enough evidence to bring him down. In truth, LBJ was too clever for him. Dugger did have doubts about the accuracy of the Warren Commission but does not appear to believe that LBJ was involved in the conspiracy.

Max Holland makes an interesting point when he reviewed "The Guilty Men" when it appeared on the History Channel:

The Guilty Men presents “yet another theory” about the assassination. But The Guilty Men doesn’t merely present the theory in a neutral manner; it offers up big lies uncritically, and therefore propagates them. If an objective documentary were to be made about Johnson’s alleged involvement, say 60 minutes in duration, 30 minutes would have to be devoted to presenting Johnson’s side of the case. It would take at least that long to rebut the potpourri of charges that have been leveled over the years (ranging from variations on Garrison’s “Qui bono” theory to the “oil depletion allowance” motive). Unfortunately from Johnson’s perspective, his alleged co-conspirators all have one thing in common: they are deceased. Indeed, it does not seem coincidental that the persons so casually slandered in “The Guilty Men” (such as Edward Clark, Don Thomas, Cliff Carter, Clint Murchison, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover, and John Connally) all happen to be dead. This has been the The Men Who Killed Kennedy modus operandi since the first two episodes had to be redone.

At the same time, some very well-informed individuals about Texas politics are still around, and their absence from the program is glaring. One thinks of Ronnie Dugger, for example, who wrote (as editor of the Texas Observer) about the machinations of some of the individuals mentioned during the course of the program, most notably Billie Sol Estes. Dugger is not known to be overly enamored of Lyndon Johnson and is on record as not even subscribing to the Warren Commission’s findings. How is it that someone with his demonstrated knowledge, expertise, and first-hand exposure to Texas politics and business circa 1963 - a journalist who knows the Texas players - is not to be found on the program? Might it have something to do with Dugger’s ability to debunk these allegations?

http://www.spartacus...nnie_dugger.htm

When LBJ arrived back in Washington after being sworn in as president on Air Force One, he asked his driver to stop off at a friend's home, before going to the White House. It has been claimed that this was a significant visit and reflected something about his state of mind. Does anyone know who he visited? Do you know why the man did not speak to him?

I have a copy of Barbie Zelizer's book and unfortunately it is only a one line reference to two articles written by Dugger: November 22, 1963: The Case is not Closed (11th November 1966) and Batter Up (3rd February 1966). According to Barr McCleellan, the author of, Blood Money and Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K. (2003) Dugger considered that Lyndon B. Johnson was capable of being involved in the assassination: "Ronnie Dugger concluded Johnson was a man without moral principle or compass, a man capable of murder and assassination. While editor of the Texas Observer, he closely followed the developments in the Warren investigation, and the newsweekly regularly reported on progress. In perhaps the closest he got to the conspiracy was noting recognition between Oswald and Ruby just before the fatal shot." (page 299)

I have just ordered Dugger's book, Politicians: Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson - The Drive for Power (1982). Does he discuss the assassination of JFK in the book?

Ronnie Dugger worked for the Texas Observer in 1963. Does anyone know if he carried out any investigations into the Kennedy assassination?

In 1963 Joseph and Stewart Alsop syndicated column appeared in over 300 newspapers. Both these journalists had a long-term relation with the CIA.

Stewart Alsop was a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) before being transfered to work under Allen Dulles at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944. After the war Alsop co-wrote with Thomas Braden (later to become head of the International Organizations Division of the CIA), a history of the OSS called Sub Rosa: The O.S.S. and American Espionage (1946).

After the war Joseph and Stewart Alsop established the thrice-weekly "Matter of Fact" column for the New York Herald Tribune. Stewart concentrated on domestic politics, whereas his brother traveled the world to cover foreign affairs. In 1946 Joseph and Stewart Alsop urged militant anti-communism. They warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless the country addressed this problem, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country... it is the right - the very extreme right - which is most likely to gain victory."

The Alsops lived in Washington where they associated with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials that became known as the Georgetown Set. This included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Thomas Braden, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Desmond FitzGerald, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.

Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has pointed out: "In long exchanges, heated by intellectual passion and alcohol, their vision of a new world order began to take shape. Internationalist, abrasive, competitive, these men had an unshakeable belief in their value system, and in their duty to offer it to others. They were the patricians of the modern age, the paladins of democracy, and saw no contradiction in that. This was the elite which ran American foreign policy and shaped legislation at home. Through think-tanks to foundations, directorates to membership of gentlemen's clubs, these mandarins were interlocked by their institutional affiliations and by a shared belief in their own superiority."

In 1947 several of these figures were involved in establishing the CIA. It has been argued that the OSS provided a model for the CIA. Others have suggested that it was the British Security Coordination (BSC) that was the true forerunner. According to Joseph C. Goulden several of the "old boys" who were around for the founding of the CIA like repeating a mantra, “The Brits taught us everything we know - but by no means did they teach us everything that they know.”

According to Carl Bernstein, Joseph Alsop did important work for the CIA: "In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA. Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters."

Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995), argues that the Alsop brothers worked very closely with Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. He points out that he "considered his friends Joe and Stewart Alsop to be reliable purveyors of the company line in their columns". In 1953 the brothers helped out Edward Lansdale and the CIA in the Philippines: "Wisner actively courted the Alsops, along with a few other newsmen he regarded as suitable outlets. When Lansdale was manipulating electoral politics in the Philippines in 1953, Wisner asked Joe Alsop to write some columns warning the Filipinos not to steal the election from Magsaysay. Alsop was happy to comply, though he doubted his columns would have much impact on the Huks. After the West German counterintelligence chief, Otto John, defected to the Soviet Union in 1954, Wisner fed Alsop a story that the West German spymaster had been kidnapped by the KGB. Alsop dutifully printed the story, which may or may not have been true."

Richard Bissell, the head of the Directorate for Plans (DPP), was also a close friend of the Alsops. He later recalled: "The Alsops were fairly discreet in what they asked, but I was not as discreet as I should have been. They could usually guess." Bissell admitted to Jonathan Lewis, who was helping him with his memoirs, that the Alsops were the only journalists who he provided with secret information. In 1955 the Alsops reported details of what had taken place in a National Security Council meeting. Allen W. Dulles was so angry that he ordered Wisner to cancel a meeting with the Alsop brothers that weekend at his farm in Maryland. On another occasion, Paul Nitze was so upset that they published the contents of a sensitive cable, that he told them, "You're not the Alsop brothers! You're the Hiss brothers!"

In 1957, during his first and only visit to the Soviet Union, Joe was entrapped by the KGB in a Moscow hotel room. According to Evan Thomas, "Alsop foolishly allowed himself to be caught in a honey trap by the KGB on a trip to Moscow in 1957. The Russians took photos of Alsop in the midst of a homosexual act with a KGB agent and tried to blackmail him into becoming an agent." Edwin Yoder has argued in his book, Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue (1995), that the existence of these photographs did not stop Alsop from continuing to denounce the Soviet Union. However, twelve years later Alsop discovered that the photographs had come into the possession of J. Edgar Hoover. It is possible that Alsop was so important to the CIA that they were able to protect him from the KGB operation.

Alsop held liberal views on domestic issues and became a supporter of John Kennedy. According to Katharine Graham, Alsop told her in 1958 that he had the potential to become president. When she stated: "Joe, surely you're not serious." He replied, "Darling, I think he will certainly be nominated and quite probably be elected." In 1960 Kennedy did win the Democratic Party nomination. Alsop now joined forces with Philip Graham to persuade Kennedy to make Lyndon Johnson, instead of Stuart Symington, his running-mate. It is claimed that Alsop commented to Kennedy: "We've come to talk to you about the vice-presidency. Something may happen to you, and Symington is far too shallow a puddle for the United States to dive into. Furthermore, what are you going to do about Lyndon Johnson? He's much too big a man to leave up in the Senate." Graham then added that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble.

In her autobiography, Personal History (1997) Katharine Graham revealed that her husband and Alsop lobbied for President John Kennedy to appoint their friend, Douglas Dillon, as Secretary of the Treasury. Arthur Schlesinger points out in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965) that the Kennedy team "were distressed by (Graham and Alsop) impassioned insistence that Douglas Dillon should and would-be made Secretary of the Treasury. Without knowing Dillon, we mistrusted him on principle as a presumed exponent of Republican economic policies."

Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has argued that a high-level CIA official told her that Stewart Alsop was a "CIA agent". Saunders discussed this issue with Joseph Alsop. He dismissed this claim as "absolute nonsense" but admitted that both men were very close to the agency: "I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close... I dare say he did perform some tasks - he did the correct thing as an American... The Founding Fathers of the CIA were close personal friends of ours... It was a social thing. I have never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn't have to... I've done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen... The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust... Stew and I were trusted, and I'm proud of it."

One wonders if the CIA had any influence over the way that the Alsop brothers reported the JFK assassination.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKalsop.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/NDstewart_alsop.htm

Anything published by the Daily Mail has to be viewed through the filter that the Mail will publish any old crap and put a "respectable" veneer on it. Despite its obvious deficiencies, some people (my mother in law included) think it's a serious newspaper. It's not.

Daily Mail is indeed a terrible newspaper. However, it is the most popular online newspaper in the world. One of the reasons for this is that it is one of the few newspapers willing to publish articles on "political conspiracies". For example, it was the only mainstream paper in the UK to cover in depth the murder of Dr. David Kelly. It also publishes articles on the JFK assassination.

In 1957, during his first and only visit to the Soviet Union, Joe Alsop was entrapped by the KGB in a Moscow hotel room. According to Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995): "Alsop foolishly allowed himself to be caught in a honey trap by the KGB on a trip to Moscow in 1957. The Russians took photos of Alsop in the midst of a homosexual act with a KGB agent and tried to blackmail him into becoming an agent." Edwin Yoder has argued in his book, Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue (1995), that the existence of these photographs did not stop Alsop from continuing to denounce the Soviet Union. However, twelve years later Alsop discovered that the photographs had come into the possession of J. Edgar Hoover.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKalsop.htm

Email from Steven Martin, the son of Shirley Martin:

My mom never felt that the death of my sister Vickie was part of the conspiracy. This erroneous piece of information originated with Ruth Paine. My mom never really cared for or trusted Ruth, and I think Ruth was aware of my mom’s feelings toward. Shirley did stop her active involvement in the case following my sister’s death, but it was a result of the natural and terrible grief a parent feels at the loss of child, not because she felt Vickie had been a victim of the conspiracy. My mother continued to study the assassination until her death. As I have mentioned to others, she never really cared who killed Kennedy; she cared who didn’t kill him. She believed, as I do, that Lee did not pull a trigger that day in November.

Yesterday, Chris Huhne, the former energy secretary, admitted lying about a speeding ticket that he blamed on his wife in 2003. That was ten years ago and it is no coincidence that the story was first published by two Tory newspapers, the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, at a time when he was causing problems for David Cameron in his coalition government. Huhne was also against the Murdoch takeover of Sky (Murdoch owns the Sunday Times). Of course, around that time, the other left of centre politician in the cabinet, Vince Cable, was caught in the Tory supporting Daily Telegraph sting that got him taken off the Murdoch takeover bid and given to the pro-Murdoch Jeremy Hunt.

In both cases they were not protected by their party leader, Nick Clegg. Of course, both men were seen as possible replacements for Clegg as party leader. That would have caused problems for David Cameron and the Tory supporting press.

I have no sympathy for either Chris Huhne or Vince Cable who both deserved exposure. However, what about those Tory politicians who are probably getting up to things far worse than Huhne and Cable?

One of my friends was a political adviser to Tony Blair. He once told me that political parties use friendly journalists and other investigators to collect damaging stories about leading figures in other political parties. These are rarely used but instead are traded against each other. In this way leading politicians are protected from these stories. It also makes sure that the only damaging stories that appear are against politicians who belong to small parties without stories to barter or mavericks in the major parties who are not being protected.

We now know that LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to collect information about other politicians. Is it possible that Robert Kennedy was blackmailed into silence after the assassination of JFK? If so, my guess is that it was about RFK’s involvement in the plots to kill Castro.

I was reminded of this “blackmail” strategy when reading an excellent biography of William A. Wallace (American Dreamer). Wallace was President Roosevelt’s most left-wing cabinet minister and it was a great surprise when he selected Wallace to be his running-mate in the 1940 Presidential Election.

During the campaign Paul Block, publisher of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, managed to get hold of some letters written by Wallace to Nicholas Roerich in 1933-34. The content of the letters suggested that Wallace held left-wing views and unconventional opinions on religion. Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest political advisers, contacted Block and told him if he published the letters they would reveal that Wendell Willkie, the Republication Party candidate, was having an affair with Irita Van Doren, the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune. As a result, Block did not publish the letters.

Wallace’s left-wing views meant that party managers got him removed from the ticket in the 1944 Presidential Election (it was clear that Roosevelt would not live for another four years).

Wallace was appalled by Harry Truman’s drift to the right, especially his decision to be a Cold War warrior and his unwillingness to push for civil rights legislation. In 1948 Wallace took on the might of the Democrat and Republican parties.

Wallace travelled to the Deep South and called for the end of the Jim Crow laws. He was attacked at every point he stopped and made a speech. One of his followers said: "You can call us black, or you can call us red, but you can't call us yellow." Wallace commented: "To me, fascism is no longer a second-hand experience. No, fascism has become an ugly reality - a reality which I have tasted it neither so fully nor so bitterly as millions of others. But I have tasted it."

Glen H. Taylor also campaigned against racial discrimination. In Alabama he entered a public hall through an entrance marked "Colored". He pointed out in his autobiography, The Way It Was With Me (1979): "I was a United States senator, and by God, I wasn't going to slink down a dark alley to get to a back door for Bull Connor or any other bigoted son of a bitch. I'd go in any goddamned door I pleased, and I pleased to go in that door right there." Taylor was arrested and at a subsequent trial he was fined $50 and given a 180-day suspended sentence on charges of breach of peace, assault, and resisting arrest.

However, without the protection of the party machine, the Nicholas Roerich letters were published in the mainstream press and Wallace’s chances of getting elected came to an end.

http://www.spartacus...USARwallace.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/NDglen_taylor.htm

Good to hear that Jim is still promoting the case after all these years. I was very impressed when I met him in Dallas a few years ago.

Cass Canfield, was the head of Harper Brothers, the company that published William Manchester's book on the assassination of John Kennedy. In his autobiography, Up and Down and Around (1971) he gives a long account of the problems getting the book published without explaining in detail what the Kennedy's were complaining about (it definitely had a lot to do with the way LBJ was portrayed).

Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999), has pointed out that Canfield was very closely associated with the CIA and was responsible for publishing several books favourable to the organization. He also arranged for Michael Josselson to work at Harper & Brothers after being exposed as the CIA organizer of the Congress for Cultural Freedom: "Cass Canfield, one of the most distinguished of American publishers... enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer, and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles, whose memoirs The Craft of Intelligence he published in 1963."

http://www.spartacus...AcanfieldCS.htm

In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America's serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.

Gareth Jones was a British journalist who visited the Soviet Union in 1933. On the 31st March, The Evening Standard carried a report by Jones on the conditions he discovered in the rural areas that he considered to be the result of Stalin's Five Year Plan: "The main result of the Five Year Plan has been the tragic ruin of Russian agriculture. This ruin I saw in its grim reality. I tramped through a number of villages in the snow of March. I saw children with swollen bellies. I slept in peasants’ huts, sometimes nine of us in one room. I talked to every peasant I met, and the general conclusion I draw is that the present state of Russian agriculture is already catastrophic but that in a year’s time its condition will have worsened tenfold... The Five-Year Plan has built many fine factories. But it is bread that makes factory wheels go round, and the Five-Year Plan has destroyed the bread-supplier of Russia."

The American journalists based in Moscow had become too close to Stalin's government and had been used in its campaign against Leon Trotsky. Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent of the United Press International pointed out in in his autobiography, Assignment in Utopia (1937): "On emerging from Russia, Jones made a statement which, startling though it sounded, was little more than a summary of what the correspondents and foreign diplomats had told him. To protect us, and perhaps with some idea of heightening the authenticity of his reports, he emphasized his Ukrainian foray rather than our conversation as the chief source of his information. In any case, we all received urgent queries from our home offices on the subject. But the inquiries coincided with preparations under way for the trial of the British engineers. The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors at least for the duration of the trial was for all of us a compelling professional necessity."

Lyons and his friend Walter Duranty decided to try and undermine these reports by Jones. Lyons told Bassow Whitman, the author of The Moscow Correspondents: Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost (1988): "We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones a xxxx. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka." Duranty published an article, Russians Hungry But Not Starving, in the New York Times on 31st March 1933, where he argued that there was a conspiracy in the agricultural sector by "wreckers" and "spoilers" had "made a mess of Soviet food production".

However, he did admit that the Soviet government had made some harsh decisions: "To put it brutally - you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevik leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialism as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent because they are animated by fanatical conviction."

Duranty then went on to criticize Gareth Jones. He admitted that there had been "serious food shortages" but Jones was wrong to suggest that the Soviet Union was enduring a famine: "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from disease due to malnutrition, especially in the Ukraine, North Caucasus, and Lower Volga." He then went on to claim that Jones description of famine in the Soviet Union was an example of "wishful thinking".

Eugene Lyons has argued: "Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes - but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials."

Gareth Jones wrote to the New York Times complaining about Duranty's article in the newspaper. He pointed out that he was not guilty of "the strange suggestion that I was forecasting the doom of the Soviet regime, a forecast I have never ventured". Jones argued that he had visited over twenty villages where he had seen incredible suffering. He accused journalists such as Duranty and Lyons of being turned "into masters of euphemism and understatement". Jones said that they had given "famine" the polite name of "food shortage" and "starving to death" is softened to read as "wide-spread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition".

Sally J. Taylor, the author of Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty (1990) has argued that Lyon's record on the famine was appalling: "He had been among the earliest to hear of it, suggested at first by the investigations of his own secretary and confirmed later by the findings of Barnes and Stoneman. But Lyons declined to go into the famine-stricken area.... The zealous Lyons fulminated about moral and ethical issues, but he had shown little inclination himself to interrupt what was an unusually successful social life in Moscow."

Walter Duranty and Eugene Lyons were not the only journalists in the Soviet Union who attacked Gareth Jones for his account of the famine. Louis Fischer questioned Jones estimate of a million dead: "Who counted them? How could anyone march through a country and count a million people? Of course people are hungry there - desperately hungry. Russia is turning over from agriculture to industrialism. It's like a man going into business on small capital."

William Henry Chamberlin, was another journalist who was friendly to the Soviet regime. Chamberlin was allowed into Kuban that autumn. On 13th September, 1933, Chamberlain argued in the Christian Science Monitor: "The whole North Caucasus is now engaged in the task of getting in the richest harvest of years, and shows few outward signs of recent poor crops." However, Chamberlain told officials at the British Embassy that he estimated that two million had died in Kazakhstan, a half a million in the North Caucasus, and two million in the Ukraine. Historians have estimated that as many as seven million people died during this period. Journalists based in Moscow were willing to accept the word of the Soviet authorities for their information. Walter Duranty even told his friend, Hubert Knickerbocker, that the reported famine "is mostly bunk".

As a result of his reports Jones was banned from ever visiting the Soviet Union again. In late 1934 he set off on a tour of other countries. After spending six weeks in Japan he travelled to China. While in Manchukuo in July, 1935 he was captured along with a German journalist called Muller, by bandits who demanded a ransom of 100,000 Mexican silver pesos. Muller was released after two days, but 16 days later, on 12th August, 1935, the bandits killed him.

George Carey, who made a television documentary on Jones in 2012 has argued that he may have been murdered by agents of the NKVD in retaliation for the articles he had written attacking the policies of Joseph Stalin: "Until now all that was known for certain was that Muller was released on a highly spurious pretext about having been freed on parole in order to raise the ransom, and two days later Gareth was shot for no conceivable reason... Probably we'll never know for certain what happened. However our investigations have shown that the Chinese contact who loaned Jones and Muller a car to travel to Mongolia was definitely an NKVD agent, and there's strong evidence to suggest that Muller might also have been."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GBjonesG.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlyonsE.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdurantyW.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JchamberlainWH.htm

In 1963 President Kennedy appointed Michael Straight to the post of the chairmanship of the Advisory Council on the Arts. It was a brave appointment as Straight had been editor of the New Republic in the late 1940s and had written a powerful book about McCarthyism, Trial By Television. This made him a target of right-wing forces and he was attacked for his liberalism and accused of being pro-communist.

In fact, Straight had been a Soviet spy in the 1930s. Aware that he would be vetted - and his background investigated - he approached Arthur Schlesinger, one of Kennedy's advisers, and told him that Anthony Blunt had recruited him as a spy while an undergraduate at Trinity College. Schlesinger suggested that he told his story to the FBI.

Straight's information was passed on to MI5 and Arthur Martin, the principal molehunter, went to America to interview him. Straight confirmed the story, and agreed to testify in a British court if necessary. Christopher Andrew, the author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009) has argued that Straight's information was "the decisive breakthrough in MI5's investigation of Anthony Blunt".

Peter Wright, who took part in the meetings about Anthony Blunt case, argues in his book, Spycatcher (1987) that Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5, decided to give Blunt immunity from prosecution because of his hostility towards the Labour Party and the damage it would do to the Conservative Party: "Hollis and many of his senior staff were acutely aware of the damage any public revelation of Blunt's activities might do themselves, to MI5, and to the incumbent Conservative Government. Harold Macmillan had finally resigned after a succession of security scandals, culminating in the Profumo affair. Hollis made little secret of his hostility to the Labour Party, then riding high in public opinion, and realized only too well that a scandal on the scale that would be provoked by Blunt's prosecution would surely bring the tottering Government down."

Blunt was interviewed by Arthur Martin at the Courtauld Institute on 23rd April 1964. Martin later wrote that when he mentioned Straight's name he "noticed that by this time Blunt's right cheek was twitching a good deal". Martin offered Blunt "an absolute assurance that no action would be taken against him if he now told the truth". Martin recalled: "He went out of the room, got himself a drink, came back and stood at the tall window looking out on Portman Square. I gave him several minutes of silence and then appealed to him to get it off his chest. He came back to his chair and confessed." He admitted being a Soviet agent and named twelve other associates as spies including Straight, John Cairncross, Leo Long, Peter Ashby and Brian Symon.

MI5 then falsely reported to the CIA that Blunt had only spied during the Second World War and that he was not part of the Philby group that was involved in post-war spying.

The truth about Blunt, who was never prosecuted, did not become public until 1979 when a Labour Party MP received information about Blunt. Margaret Thatcher told the Commons that the information that had led to Straight's confession was not "usable as evidence on which to base a prosecution". This was also untrue as they also had Blunt's confession.

http://www.spartacus...el_straight.htm

11927? An important year for Stalin and Trotsky.

Can one know whether she supported Stalin or Trotsky?

I don't know for sure but her previous political activities would have suggested Trotsky.

Rayna Prohme is someone who is long forgotten. She died of encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, on Monday, 21st November 1927. She was only 36 years old.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952) "On many occasions I had noticed a young girl, slight and bony, deliciously awkward and yet un self-conscious, alive and eager in her study. She had bright red curly hair. It was loose enough about her face to form an aureole, a flaming aureole, with sun and brightness in it. Her eyes were large, reddish brown and warm, with interest and laughter in them... I saw her first on my way to the university in September. She was the only person I remember on a train filled with students. She was like a flame with her red hair and vivid face. She had a clear, happy look, the look of a person who loved life.... I can see Rayna lying on her side in a dull green dress, her cheek cupped in her hand, her eyes on the book she was reading, her mouth half open in her intent interest."

Vincent Sheean, Personal History (1933): "She was slight, not very tall, with short red-gold hair and a frivolous turned-up nose. Her eyes could actually change colour with the changes of light, or even with changes of mood. Her voice, fresh, cool and very American, sounded as if it had secret rivulets of laughter running underneath it all the time, ready to come to the surface without warning... I had never heard anybody laugh as she did - it was the gayest, most unself-conscious sound in the world. You might have thought that it did not come from a person at all, but from some impulse of gaiety in the air."

http://www.spartacus...k/USAprohme.htm

The Guardian (8th January, 2013)

Alex Jones, the pro-gun radio shock jock who founded a petition to deport Piers Morgan from the US, has launched into a series of lengthy tirades on the British host's CNN show – calling Morgan a "hatchet man of the new world order", warning him that "1776 will commence again" if firearms are taken away and challenging the presenter to fight him in a boxing ring.

After a briefly civil start as the two sat face to face, Jones launched into conspiracy theories about global banks trying to disarm US citizens, Britain being a "police state" plagued by violent crime despite gun curbs and declared that all the world's tyrants had disarmed their people.

As Morgan tried to interject with questions, Jones continued with his browbeating delivery, declaring that Morgan would not deter him with "little factoids". Morgan had been attempting to discuss the types of firearms used in major US massacres and the relative rates of gun killings between America and other countries.

Morgan has enraged the extreme end of the US gun lobby by calling for a ban on high-powered assault rifles and large ammunition magazines. On the day of the Newtown school shootings in the US the host angrily confronted members of the pro-gun movement on his nightly show, denouncing as "total hogwash" their argument that more guns mean less crime.

You can see a clip from the programme here:

http://www.guardian....gan-gun-control

British audiences would tend to take against rants made by people like Alex Jones. We prefer calmer, logical, intellectual type of discourse on television. Maybe this is a cultural thing. Is he popular in the US?

Why did LBJ, the FBI, the CIA, and the military go to such concerted lengths to cover up for these people, including provision of a ready-made lone-nut patsy?

The only possible reason was that they were hired indirectly by the CIA, etc. The same is possibly true of the anti-Castro Cubans who have been closely associated with the assassination.

Maggie Field was another early researcher who worked closely with others in this group including Mark Lane, Léo Sauvage, Vincent J. Salandria, Harold Feldman, Shirley Martin, Penn Jones, Harold Weisberg, Ray Marcus and Sylvia Meagher.

Field's book on the Kennedy assassination, The Evidence, was rejected by Random House in 1967. She decided to revise the manuscript: "a complete and total revamping of each page". However, she was unable to find a publisher. Her friend, Ray Marcus commented: "I know she was frustrated and disappointed about this, although she rarely said so - it would be super human for her not to be." He believed that if it had been published it would have been one of the most important books on the case.

Maggie Field told the Los Angeles Free Press in December, 1967. "Until we can get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination, this country is going to remain a sick country. No matter what we do. Because we cannot live with that crime. We just can't. The threat is too great. There are forces in this country who have gotten away with this thing, and will strike again. And not any one of us is safe."

Maggie Field died of a blood disease on 31st July, 1997.

Did anyone get the chance to meet Maggie Field?

http://www.spartacus...k/JFKfieldM.htm

I met Maggie Field on quite a few occasions, and went to her home several times. Unquestionably, Ray Marcus is the one who knew her the best.

As I recall, her book was not the standard "book", but rather a large size series of photo exhibits which she called "panoplies" and which she sought to publish as an oversize type book.

The Fields were quite wealthy, and lived in a very large house in Beverly Hills. I do recall one occasion when Garrison was visiting Los Angeles, and Maggie hosted an event at her place.

Maggie was not a high level analyst of the evidence (and did not write, or think, like Sylvia Meagher). She believed the Government had deliberately lied to the people, and was angry about it, and wanted to see justice done.

DSL

12/30/12

Thank you David for this information. John Kelin makes it clear in his book, Praise from a Future Generation (2007) that you were one of the first to become involved in JFK research. Along with Mark Lane, Vince Salandria and Ray Marcus, you are the only one left from that group that were active between 1963-67.