W. Niederhut

Outstanding piece of work, Jim, and highly relevant to our nation's current political and racial turmoil. The only mainstream media production I have seen that focused on the Kennedy brothers' critical role in the Civil Rights movement is the recent Bobby Kennedy for President HBO series, which relied extensively on commentaries by African Americans involved in the Civil Rights movement, including Congressman John Lewis and Harry Belafonte. I started reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction a few years ago, to try to better understand the surprising hostility in some quarters to Obama's presidency. (I also watched Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation for the first time, and was truly shocked by the venality of that horrific mythology.) What happened, historically, to JFK and RFK's Civil Rights legacy reminds me, to some extent, of what happened to Ulysses Grant. The best books I have read on the subject, along with Foner and James McPherson's outstanding Battle Cry of Freedom, are Grant's own fabulous Memoirs, (a 19th century bestseller, for good reason) the Grant biography by McFeely, (I haven't read the new Ron Chernow biography yet) and Ari Hogeboom's related biography of Rutherford Hayes. Hayes maintained a peculiar, sincere belief until late in life that the Southern aristocracy would protect the rights of the freed slaves after 1877. His delusion was fostered by unfamiliarity with the South, and an old college friend from Texas who corresponded with him for years, assuring him of the noblesse oblige of the plantation caste, etc. Meanwhile, Ulysses Grant-- the most popular American of the 19th century -- has been remembered largely as a drunken, inept grifter, while Robert E. Lee has been virtually canonized. Likewise, LBJ has been lionized for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, in sync with the continued character assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

Who hated JFK in 1963? Probably a long list, but I would like to ask the forum. Here's a short, preliminary list -- based on reports from various sources that I have read in recent years. 1) Allen Dulles -- fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs 2) General Charles Cabell-- fired, with Dulles, after the Bay of Pigs 3) Prescott Bush -- said he would "never forgive" JFK for firing Dulles 4) Cord Meyer-- cuckolded by JFK 5) General Edward Lansdale -- JFK rejected him as ambassador to Saigon, later shut down Mongoose 6) William Harvey -- demoted by JFK to a post in Rome 7) General Lyman Lemnitzer -- demoted as Head of the Joint Chiefs, after the Operation Northwoods proposal 😎 Henry Luce 9) David Ben Gurion -- furious about JFK's firm opposition to Israel's Dimona Nuclear Project 10) Meyer Lansky -- angry about JFK's capitulation on Cuba 11) Various Mafiosi (Trafficante, Marcello, Giancana) 12) Various Operation 40/Bay of Pigs personnel (?) including Nixon, GHWB, Hunt, Morales, et.al. 13) LBJ (?) 14) J. Edgar Hoover

When I look at Edward Lansdale's detailed knowledge of black ops like Mongoose, it seems like a very short leap to imagine him organizing the 11/22/63 op in Dallas. Interesting also to contemplate the "Special Group" list involved in Mongoose in the weeks prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- LBJ, Bundy, Lemnitzer, McCone, and Bill Harvey, among others.

So, was LBJ's misguided commitment to escalating the war the result of a quid pro quo agreement with the men who conspired to kill JFK? If so, he and the conspirators would have had a very good reason to falsify the history of NSAM 263, JFK, Galbraith, etc.

A related question is WHY this JFK/Vietnam history was deliberately falsified by Halberstam's sources. Was it done; 1) to deflect blame for the Vietnam War debacle, or 2) to hide a significant motive for JFK's assassination?

And people buy this falsified history, unfortunately-- even some highly-educated people I have known. When mythology is promoted by the mainstream media, it is very difficult to dislodge it. No wonder LBJ's public-relations expert, Bill Moyers, has been so enthusiastic about the "power of myth..." 👺

Great article. Very illuminating. So, in the absence of footnotes, it is impossible to know who was giving Halberstam his false history of JFK's intention to get out of Vietnam, and/or directing him to falsify history. It seems fairly obvious that the Cold Warriors who wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam -- Bundy, Rostow, Lemnitzer, Dulles, Lansdale, LBJ, et. al. -- were also very invested in distorting the true history of NSAM 263 and its radical reversal after 11/22/63. And David Halberstam was their principle mythologist.

Has anyone ever tried to uncover and document CIA-linked payments to "historians" like Halberstam and Bugliosi? I read Carl Bernstein's Church Committe-related Rolling Stone article about Operation Mockingbird, but I don't recall any references to David Halberstam. (Incidentally, I went to a lecture Halberstam gave at Brown when I was an undergrad in the late 70s, which he, jokingly, called the "Charles Colson Honorary" guest lecture, in reference to that notorious Brown alumnus.) I imagine it would be virtually impossible to trace funding for pseudo-historical publications to the Company. In his book, Regicide, Gregory Douglas published a list of CIA-affiliated writers in an appendix, from his CIA source-- possibly bogus material.

I read somewhere that Nixon talked about using nukes in Vietnam as a kind of "Mad Man" bluff tactic. As for Ken Burns, my question is, "Why?" (As with Halberstam.) Are they simply bad historians, or is it something worse?

Lance, I agree, entirely, that it is important for all of us to get the facts straight, and to eschew the propagation of disinformation. As a matter of philosophical logic, however, I would point out that disproving a particular alleged "fact" -- or theory based on that fact -- does not constitute proof of a different theory, like the Warren Commision's "Lone Nut" theory. (A so-called "straw man" rhetorical trick.) So, for example, as JFK assassination researchers work to assemble facts and organize explanatory theories about the details of JFK's murder -- like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with some missing pieces -- their occasional mistakes don't prove, by any stretch, that the Warren Commission Report was a true representation of reality, the true "picture." It wasn't.

Lance, If you're sincerely interested in common sense and logic, my suggestion is to stop wasting your time on these straw man arguments. Try studying Newton's laws of motion as they pertain to the Zapruder film. That is all you need in the way of "common sense and logic" to thoroughly debunk the Warren Commission's "Lone Nut" in the TSBD with the Carcano fiction. People can endlessly debate about the many complex, forensic details of JFK's murder, but the "Lone Nut" in the TSBD with the Carcano narrative is, obviously, nonsense. Frankly, I'm amazed that any rational, informed person would still believe that it is a scientifically viable theory. It isn't.

I'm many years behind the curve on this kind of historical research, but one of the first books that I read on the subject of Vietnam and the JFK assassination was Col. L. Fletcher Prouty's book, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, which I found on Amazon two or three years ago, after re-watching Oliver Stone's film, JFK, and reading somewhere that Mr. X (played by Donald Sutherland) in the film was based loosely on Col. L. Fletcher Prouty. Prouty, certainly, believed that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy involving his former boss, Ed Lansdale, and a number of other high-level U.S. government officials who were opposed to JFK's policy decisions in Vietnam (and at the Bay of Pigs.) I don't recall whether Prouty was aware of Galbraith's major influence on JFK's foreign policy decisions in Southeast Asia, but his direct observations as the Joint Chiefs Liaison to the CIA are consistent with the history described in Galbraith's (and John Newman's) writings. I also noticed, around the time I read his book(s), that Prouty was being maligned on several internet sites as a conspiracy nut, anti-Semite, and pseudo-historian-- which is an odd thing to say about a guy who was a firsthand observational source for many of the "historical" events of that time.

I wonder if Galbraith talked, or wrote, about his opinions regarding JFK's assassins. He must, surely, have wondered about a conspiracy involving the Cold Warriors who had opposed JFK's plans in Southeast Asia, (and his decisions during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

Fascinating article about John Kenneth Galbraith, who really seems to have been a JFK era Man for All Seasons. I have only read one of his many books over the years-- The Great Crash-- but I remember it as a well-written history of 1929, and a primer on Keynesian economics. Galbraith, with his deep understanding of history, seems to have played a major role in convincing JFK that the conflict in Indochina was, in essence, anti-colonial. But, what is also striking in your article are the accounts of Galbraith's nemeses, the Cold War hawks (including Rostow and Harriman) who were determined to sabotage JFK's evolving plans to de-escalate the Cold War, and get out of Vietnam. I haven't read Galbraith's accounts of the WWII bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan, (and didn't even know about them before reading your article) but he must have despised General Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay, another thorn in JFK's side, long after the fire-bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and Pyong Yang. LeMay seems to have been a major figure in the history of the concept of bombing people back to the Stone Age, during and after WWII. I remember Jim Lehrer asking George W. Bush and John Kerry, in one of their 2004 Presidential debates, what they believed to be the "lessons of Vietnam." (And, of course, we were, by then, already horribly bogged down in the U.S. invasion-induced Iraqi civil war.) Dubya completely ducked the question.

Very interesting thread. My impression is that John and Bobby Kennedy's Irish Catholicism played a central role in saving the planet in 1962, and in their assassinations. Many Americans tend to think of "Christian" morality in terms of Puritanism-- the pietistic Protestantism of the original New England colonies, which has played such a major role in American cultural (and economic) history. Max Weber, and others, have written at length about the historical relationship between the Protestant Reformation and capitalism in Northern Europe and the U.S. It seems like no mere coincidence that many of the most mercenary American capitalists (and CIA overseers) in our 20th century military-industrial complex-- including the Dulles brothers and the Bush family -- were only one or two generations removed from pious Protestant clergymen. But their familial Protestantism had morphed into a kind of mercenary, militant "manifest destiny" to oppose communism, even if it meant bombing millions of human beings back to the Stone Age. Of course, most people would scoff at the notion of John and Bobby Kennedy being examples of "Christian" morality. They, certainly, weren't Puritans. But they were Irish Catholics who understood the basic, traditional Christian concept that all human beings are created "in the image and likeness" of God, and that murder and exploitation of the poor is a sin. I recall reading an account of a meeting President Kennedy had with the Joint Chiefs, in which one of the generals (possibly Curtis LeMay) had declared that the U.S. could win a first-strike nuclear war, even if our own casualties were enormous. After the meeting, JFK told Bobby, privately, that "these guys are nuts."

This review is frighteningly Orwellian. Well written, superficially persuasive, and utterly dishonest. The examples are legion, including the physically absurd argument that the Zapruder film footage is consistent with a fatal head shot fired from behind the limo. Not. My question. What motivates people like Litwin and Parnell to engage in propagating this kind of disinformazia? Not lack of intelligence, because both are, obviously, good writers. Money? Some sort of misguided moral or political agenda?

The history of these failed JFK assassination plots also raises some questions, for me, about the timing and motives of the conspirators. For example, the date of the May 1963 Nashville plot seems to indicate that the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy was not initiated in response to; 1) his June American University "peace" speech, 2) his nuclear test ban initiative, or 3) his October decision to withdraw from Vietnam, per se. Was the conspiracy launched, in earnest, after the peaceful October 27, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis resolution? Also, how long would it have taken the conspirators to successfully execute these black ops, after the decision was made to do so?

No, I need to study the facts. Were these different estimates of the time of Ferrie's death?

I'm re-posting this, because Mr. Litwin and his fellow "Lone Nutter's" still don't get it. To wit, even IF the David Ferrie autopsy report is genuine, (and one has to wonder, given the obvious sabotage of the Garrison investigation) it doesn't prove that Ferrie was not murdered, by himself or others. He could have ingested drug(s) which caused his cerebral aneurysm to rupture as a result of a hypertensive crisis.

One of the most striking things about Oliver Stone's film, JFK, for me, was the way it depicted the systematic government surveillance and harassment of Jim Garrison and his staff-- bugging offices, intimidating investigators, and even making threats against family members. (Not to mention the disappearing witnesses.) It also clearly portrayed the collusion of the mainstream U.S. media in the defamation of Garrison and his investigation. It's an observation about the "forest" rather than the trees. If Oswald had really been a "Lone Nut," why would the U.S. government have gone to such great lengths to harass and undermine Jim Garrison's investigation? It makes no sense at all.

Let me comment on this, as a graduate of Harvard Medical School, (1983) and a Board Certified psychiatrist. The autopsy evidence (above) clearly supports the conclusion that a ruptured cerebral aneurysm was the cause of David Ferrie's death. But that does not prove that he didn't commit suicide. For example, he may have taken pills that caused a hypertensive crisis, resulting in rupture of the aneurysm. An amphetamine overdose is one example. Less likely, in my opinion, but possible, would be a hypertensive crisis caused by an L-thyroxine overdose. Did they do a serum toxicology screen at autopsy?

What might they learn? Can you give us a few hints? As a newbie on this forum, my impression is that most of the members here are either, 1) experts who know almost everything there is to know about JFK's murder, or, 2) public relations guys who are trying, without success, to defend the badly-flawed Warren Commission Report. But, I have to hand it to you for being a good sport. Your reception here reminds me of those 18th and 19th century narratives written by white settlers captured by Native Americans. When they arrived at the Native American villages, these Caucasian captives often had to run a gauntlet between two lines of hostile Natives, who greeted them with blows and howls of execration.

I suspected that you were a masochist. No wonder you posted information about your new book on this forum. .. 😬 But, seriously, in a nutshell, as it were, aren't you, in fact, a "Lone Nutter?"

Ah, yes... The "post-truth" society... What am I afraid of? Disinformation. Mass ignorance. Mass delusions. I don't agree with Leo Strauss's Machiavellian notion that the ignorant masses must be manipulated by propaganda and false flag psy ops in order to achieve the ends of a particular government or group.

Michael, I understand your point, but the title and posted reviews clearly describe the thesis that "JFK conspiracy freaks" will embrace the accuracy of the Warren Commission "Lone Nut" narrative once they grow up. That is simply hogwash. The other truly galling thing about the "marketing" of this book, for me, is the absurdly erroneous criticism of Oliver Stone's film, JFK. I recently went back and watched the film JFK again, after spending the past two or three years studying a lot of the quality research, and I was astonished by the accuracy of the details-- including a number of things that I had missed the first two times I watched the film. In other words, my intellectual journey toward understanding 11/22/63 has been the diametric opposite of what Mr. Litwin is selling to the public.