Michael Griffith

William, thank you for posting this. Very helpful.

No, you don't "understand correctly." You have either somehow misread the original post and follow-up posts or you are deliberately misrepresenting them. No one is saying that RFK's murder of Marilyn Monroe was the plotters' "actual motive." I have not even cited it as a "motive." I've said that when they learned of the murder, they viewed it as justification for an act they were already contemplating or as an excuse to carry out their desire to have him killed. No one has said the plotters killed JFK to "avenge" Marilyn's murder. I'm sure they couldn't have cared less about Marily Monroe or whether she lived or died. They saw her murder as an excuse/justification for their conspiracy to kill JFK.

LOL. Not cherry= picking at all - It's their war to win - did you miss that part? I'm only answering this for the sake of others, especially any guests. Well, yes, of course it was "their war to win." You keep quoting this statement as if you're somehow proving something and/or validating the unconditional-withdrawal myth. Heck, Nixon said it was "their war to win." So did Abrams. So did Colby. So did just about everybody. The point, which you keep avoiding, is that (1) JFK made it clear that he opposed pulling out of South Vietnam and even opposed reducing aid to South Vietnam because he was determined to help them win the war, and (2) that JFK defended the war effort as vital, said we had to be patient and persist, and said he did not want a repeat of what happened in China. As you missed the Gen Maxwell Taylor memo in posts above? Oh, boy. You must be reading the Taylor memo with pink-shaded glasses or with half the memo blacked out. The Taylor memo does not even come close to supporting the myth that JFK was determined to unconditionally and totally disengage from Vietnam after the election. Where in the world in that memo do you see any such thing? BTW, you cannot read the 10/4/63 memo in isolation from Taylor and McNamara's 10/2/63 memo to JFK. Have you read the 10/2/63 memo? The few times when the unconditional-withdrawal-myth folks cite that memo, they usually ignore the parts that make it clear that the withdrawal was neither unconditional nor irreversible. Here's a link to that memo: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume IV, Vietnam, August–December 1963 - Office of the Historian. I suspect you guys just don't care, but it should give you pause that even the vast majority of liberal historians, who have looked at all the same evidence that you guys cite, reject as spurious and fringe the Stone-Prouty-Newman-DiEugenio-Galbraith myth that JFK was determined to totally disengage from Vietnam, no matter what, after the election. That inexcusable myth was one of the two main points of scholarly attack against Stone's 1991 movie, the other point being the obscene myth that Ed Lansdale played a key role in the plot.

That's some rather misleading cherry-picking. In that same interview, in fact right after he said it was their war to win or lose, he said he disagreed with those who were advocating withdrawal, and he added that this would be a "great mistake" and that "this is a very important struggle": I don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. I know people don't like Americans to be engaged in this kind of an effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it is far away. . . . A week later, when he was interviewed on NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report on 9/9/63, JFK said he even opposed reducing aid to South Vietnam, said "we must be patient" and "we must persist," and said we did not want to see a repeat of what happened in China: We are using our influence to persuade the government there to take those steps which will win back support. That takes some time and we must be patient, we must persist. Mr. Huntley: Are we likely to reduce our aid to South Viet-Nam now? THE PRESIDENT. I don't think we think that would be helpful at this time. If you reduce your aid, it is possible you could have some effect upon the government structure there. On the other hand, you might have a situation which could bring about a collapse. Strongly in our mind is what happened in the case of China at the end of World War II, where China was lost, a weak government became increasingly unable to control events. We don't want that. In the last two speeches of his life, one of them being the speech he was going to give at the Trade Mart on 11/22, JFK made clear his determination to win the war. It is misleading and dishonest to talk about JFK's Vietnam policy without quoting the firsthand statements that he himself made, but the tiny handful of researchers who keep peddling the unconditional-withdrawal myth almost never quote those statements--instead, they rely on McNamara's phony "secret debrief" and on hearsay and double hearsay statements attributed to JFK years after his death by liberal aides and associates who were trying to distance JFK from the war. And, yes, JFK firmly believed in the Domino Theory, and the theory was sadly proved correct by subsequent events. When it became clear that South Vietnam was about to fall to the Communists, Cambodia fell to Communist rule, and Laos quickly followed. The North Vietnamese Communists executed over 60,000 South Vietnamese and sent another 800,000-plus to concentration camps, where the death rate was at least 5%. Communist rule in Cambodia was even worse, where the Cambodian Communists murdered over 1 million Cambodians. In Laos, the brutality of Communist rule drove 10% of the population to leave the country by 1980.

Objective, reasonable grownups who have done any serious reading on the subject of WW II diplomacy and/or Chiang Kai-shek will look at Gibbons' single unsourced statement and will quickly and easily recognize that Gibbons simply conflated the Cairo Conference with the Tehran Conference. One obvious indication of this is found in Gibbons' very next sentence, where he recounts that FDR told Churchill that Chiang had told him that he did not want to control Indochina and did not want to administer a trusteeship in Indochina (p. 4). This is exactly what Chiang told FDR at the Cairo Conference. What Gibbons clearly intended to say is that Chiang and FDR discussed the Indochina trusteeship at the Cairo Conference and that Chiang approved the proposal, and that FDR then notified Stalin of this fact at the Tehran Conference and that Stalin agreed with the trusteeship idea. This is why every other government source and scholarly study on the Cairo and Tehran conferences and/or on Chiang says that Chiang only attended the Cairo Conference and then went home to China, and that only Stalin, FDR, and Churchill attended the Tehran Conference. In previous replies, I have cited and quoted some of the numerous sources that document these facts. The kind of error that Gibbons obviously made happens occasionally when authors make a passing comment about a subject that is not the topic of the book and is not even the topic of the paragraph. And it bears repeating that Prouty's other Tehran claim--that FDR persuaded Stalin to get Mao to stand down--is demonstrably bogus. As I have proved, the subject of Mao's operations was never even discussed at the Tehran Conference. I notice that the Prouty apologists in this thread have made no effort to defend Prouty's zany claim that Ibn Saud (the king of Saudi Arabia) attended the Cairo Conference. Prouty was fond of just making up factoids to make himself look important and to give the illusion of appearing to have inside knowledge of important historical events. Finally, I would note that in Prouty's 1975 speech at Yale, the same speech in which he claimed that Ibn Saud attended the Cairo conference, Prouty repeated his false claim that he worked with the Secret Service on presidential protection.

Uh-huh, and you obviously endorse Powers' invalid denial. You know, even Don McGovern, Jim's "gold standard" source, admits that JFK was a flagrant adulterer. Perhaps Jim is not aware of this or has chosen to stay silent about it. Why do you suppose that even McGovern is willing to admit the well-known fact that JFK was a serial adulterer but you and Jim are not? If you don't want to read the three books I've recommended, you might read the chapter on JFK's adultery in historian Thomas Reeves' book A Question of Character: A Life of John Kennedy, and the chapter on JFK's adultery in Seymour Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh's book is admittedly a bit of a hit piece, but Reeves' book is not. Reeves gives JFK credit and praise for many of his actions. Both Hersh and Reeves provide ample evidence of JFK's flagrant adultery.

Yes, indeed. There is also the fact that Marilyn's housekeeper said that Marilyn was upbeat the last time she saw her that day (before RFK and Lawson came over). Nothing in her behavior in the weeks leading up to her death indicated that she was thinking about killing herself. Her career was on the rebound. She had just gone shopping for new furniture for the house she had recently bought. These are not the normal actions of a suicidal person. I should add that Dorothy Kilgallen was aware that Marilyn was dating RFK. She dropped an obvious hint of their relationship in one of her columns shortly before Marilyn died. (I guess this is why the love-struck McGovern viciously attacks Dorothy.)

Now why in the world would Oswald have gone to Mexico City on his own initiative? The key giveaway is the fake Oswald call to the Soviet Embassy. We have abundant evidence that Oswald spoke Russian fluently, yet the fake Oswald who phoned the Soviet Embassy spoke atrocious, terrible Russian--we know this from the translator's own notes on the transcript. Clearly, that was not Oswald. This begs the question: If Oswald was a loner with no intel ties and no associates, why would anyone have bothered to impersonate him in Mexico City in a fake call to the Soviet Embassy and in fake visits to the Cuban Consulate?

A follow-up on the impossibly bright white patch seen on the lateral skull x-rays. Dr. Mantik did not just use one of JFK’s pre-mortem skull x-rays as control. He and Dr. Doug DeSalles (M.D.) also used the skull x-rays of nine other deceased persons as controls. The contrast between the light and dark areas on those skull x-rays was only a fraction of the contrast between the white patch and the dark frontal area on JFK’s lateral autopsy skull x-rays. Doug Horne: As a scientific “control,” Mantik and his research partner Dr. Doug DeSalles took OD measurements of lateral skull x-rays from nine coroner’s cases to obtain a range of numerical measurements between the brightest and darkest areas on these skull x-rays. In general, the brightest areas of the nine coroner’s cases transmitted about two or three times as much light as the darkest areas. Furthermore, subjective, visual examination of the lateral x-rays of these nine skulls did not reveal the extreme contrast between very bright and very dark areas that is seen in the JFK lateral skull x-rays. The subjective visual evidence was consistent with the OD measurements, and vice-a-versa. On the right lateral JFK skull x-ray, Dr. Mantik took many OD measurements of two specific areas. The optical density measurements for one extremely bright area located anatomically behind the ear, which he labeled “P” (for posterior) in a diagram at his lectures, was compared with the optical density measurements for a very dark area in the front of the cranium [skull] labeled “F” (for front). Amazingly, on the right JFK lateral skull x-ray, OD measurements revealed that area “P” (in the rear of the skull behind the ear) transmitted about 1100 times more light than area “F” (in the forward part of the skull which appears so dark in the x-ray image). That’s worth repeating: The “great white area” in the rear of the skull behind the ear in the JFK right lateral skull x-ray transmitted about1100 times more light than the dark area in the front of the cranium, whereas on the “control” x-rays the ratio was only about 2 or 3 to 1 between the brightest area and the darkest area on each lateral x-ray. (Inside the ARRB, Volume 2, p. 546)

You are not to be taken seriously. FYI, Galbraith's spin on the evidence, i.e., that JFK was determined to unconditionally abandon South Vietnam after the election, is viewed by the vast majority of historians as a discredited, fringe view. But that's just it: The evidence shows, and shows pretty clearly, that JFK had no intention of allowing South Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia to fall to the Communists, and that he had every intention of providing whatever military and economic aid was needed to keep South Vietnam free. The whole reason, the entire rationale, for his limited and conditional withdrawal plan was that the war was going well enough that some U.S. troops could be brought home without endangering the war effort; moreover, as JFK made clear, and as Bobby later explained, JFK felt that the war "had" to be won. Bobby even said that JFK was willing to authorize air strikes if they were needed, and expressly allowed that JFK may have been willing to send in regular combat troops if the situation ever got so bad that they were needed. Also, as I've said before, if the plotters killed JFK over Vietnam, they certainly would have knocked off LBJ when he began and continued to blunderingly hamstring and restrict our military operations. For that matter, if Vietnam was the plotters' main concern, they never would have allowed Johnson to pick such a feckless dove as Hubert Humphrey as his VP, especially given LBJ's age and health history. It just makes no sense. I agree with you about Averell Harriman's role. The fatally flawed "neutrality" pact for Laos was Harriman's doing, and his was recognized at the time. During the war, many GIs nicknamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail the "Averell Harriman Memorial Highway." What you seem to be unaware of is that JFK recognized that the Laos deal was a bad deal and was not working.

This is gibberish and nonsense. I already answered this bogus argument, and answered it with scholarly sources that are actually about the Tehran Conference and/or Chiang Kai-shek, not a lone unsourced sentence in a book about the Vietnam War. Sheesh, who are you people? Is this some kind of game to you? The U.S. Government has had nothing to do with any alleged conspiracy to smear Prouty. Many of the critics who have exposed Prouty's false and nutty claims have been ardent, anti-Deep State, anti-right-wing liberals and Scientology whistleblowers who responded to Prouty's disgraceful lies in defense of Hubbard and Scientology. If there is still a government operation whose goal is to discredit the case for conspiracy in JFK's death, that operation must be thrilled with your embarrassing refusal to face the facts about Prouty. No one--and I mean no one--has done more harm to the case for conspiracy than Prouty.

So first you peddle the nutty 9/11 conspiracy theory of "controlled demolitions," and then you run to Wikipedia in an attempt to challenge the widely known, nearly universally acknowledged fact that JFK was a serial adulterer. The books I mentioned quote a number of Kennedy family members and friends. You might also read Carl Anthony's book Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy. One of Anthony's sources was Lem Billings, a close friend of JFK's. Anthony also interviewed many of Jackie's friends, many of whom confirmed that she was aware of her husband's flagrant cheating. Mimi Alford revealed her affair with JFK in her memoir. So did Judith Exner. And, gee, you're the first person I've encountered who has disputed that Exner and JFK had an affair. I've never read a book on the JFK case that disputed this. As for Mary Pinchot Meyer, her affair with JFK was well known in DC circles, as Peter Janney documents in his book Mary's Mosaic.

I can't believe we are even having this conversation. I suggest you Google something like "JFK adultery extra-marital affairs cheating," and go from there. I would also recommend two recent books: Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency (2022), by Mark K. Updegrove. Jackie: Public, Private, Secret (2023), by J. Randy Taraborrelli. Have you heard of Mary Pinchot Meyer? Ellen Rometsch? Mimi Alford? Judith Exner? How about "Fiddle and Faddle"? Do you know who George Smathers was? Ken O'Donnell? Dave Powers? They were all good friends of JFK's and acknowledged JFK's serial adultery. Were all the Secret Service agents who reported seeing JFK with other women lying? All of them?

A key fact to remember is that the selection of the Trade Mart did not require the motorcade to drive on Elm Street. There was another way to get to the Trade Mart, a way that avoided driving on Elm Street.

Did you bother to read the first post in the thread? None of what you cited and quoted proves that JFK was determined to unconditionally and totally disengage from the Vietnam War. No one denies that there was a withdrawal plan. The problem is that a small handful of researchers, mainly Jim DiEugenio and James Galbraith and John Newman, won't admit that the withdrawal plan was plainly, clearly, and indisputably conditional and partial (some supports would remain), and that JFK intended to continue to provide military and economic aid to South Vietnam even if conditions on the ground allowed the withdrawal to be completed. The unconditional-withdrawal myth is rejected even by the vast majority of liberal, anti-war historians, including ultra-liberals such as Edwin Moise and Fredrik Logevall. The myth has been destroyed by in Dr. Marc Selverstone's recent and widely acclaimed book The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam. Selverstone's book has been praised by leading scholars from both sides of the spectrum. The unconditional-withdrawal myth is based on poor scholarship, a distorted reading of NSAMs 263 and 273, ignoring the JFK White House tapes, and dismissing as strategic lies every single firsthand statement from JFK himself during the last several months of his life, in addition to Bobby Kennedy's crucial April 1964 oral history interview in which he made it as plain as English can make something that JFK had no intention of pulling out of Vietnam and/or allowing South Vietnam to fall to the Communists.

I am simply agnostic about whether Oswald was actually in Mexico City. I think it's obvious that the "Oswald" who called the Soviet Embassy and spoke terrible Russian was not the real Oswald. And I doubt that the Oswald who visited the Cuban Consulate was the real Oswald. But, that does not mean that Oswald was not in Mexico City at the time. Marina, even under intense pressure to say otherwise, said that her husband did not go to Mexico City, but her belief is not determinative in my view. She may have been sincerely mistaken. Occam's Razor tells me that if Oswald had actually visited the Cuban Consulate, and if the CIA photographed him entering and/or leaving the consulate, the CIA would have been very willing and anxious to make this evidence available.

Holy freaking cow. I mean, you really must be kidding. So you and apparently Jim dismiss as mere "rumors" the hundreds of accounts of JFK's serial adultery, some of which come from family members and close friends, and some of them are firsthand accounts from the women themselves. Let me guess: By "proof" you mean actual photos or films of JFK committing adultery or a written confession from JFK? Well, if that's your standard, then, no, there is no "proof" that JFK was a serial adulterer. Well, heck, if that's the standard, then there's no "proof" that Joseph Kennedy was a serial adulterer either. I suppose that's another reason you and Jim like Don McGovern, who is so love-struck that he refuses to acknowledge that Marilyn Monroe was promiscuous (in fact, she was very promiscuous).

Reality check: McGovern is a love-struck Marilyn Monroe fan who can't even admit that she was promiscuous and who denies that she had any kind of a sexual relationship with RFK. McGovern is also very anti-conspiracy theory. In fact, he calls himself a "Non-Conspiracist" on his website and repeatedly condemns and derides "conspiracy theorists" and "conspiracists." But apparently Jim is okay with that because he's determined to reject LAPD whistleblower Mike Rothmiller's historic disclosures, since those disclosures include negative information about JFK and RFK, even though Rothmiller has a sterling record as an anti-CIA, anti-FBI, and anti-police corruption whistleblower. Jim likes McGovern's love-struck research because McGovern rejects Rothmiller and Thompson's important new book Bombshell. Jim doesn't seem to mind that McGovern seems to view conspiracy theories as irresponsible and fringe. McGovern derides Dorothy Kilgallen as a "gossip columnist" in his attacks on Mark Shaw's book Collateral Damage. As most here know, Dorothy was much more than a "gossip columnist." McGovern also claims that Rothmiller simply fabricated the pages from Marilyn's diaries. When anyone documents Fletcher Prouty's many bogus claims, some of which were downright nutty, and documents Prouty's prolonged close association with Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, one of the first arguments that Jim and other Prouty apologists will make is "that's what John McAdams said about Prouty!" (never mind the fact that some of Prouty's fiercest critics have been diehard liberals). But, Jim doesn't mind citing and praising Don McGovern, even though McGovern touts himself as a "non-conspiracist."

This is just sad. It is also unbelievable, given the evidence I have presented to you. I dismiss the lone unsourced sentence that you keep desperately relying on because it is refuted by literally every other primary and scholarly source on the subject. As I have proved, the vast collection of records on the conference available at the State Department's website say that only FDR, Churchill, and Stalin attended the conference, and they contain no mention of Chiang and his group even being in Tehran--and most of them specify that Chiang did not attend the Tehren Conference but only the Cairo Conference. The same is true of the available Russian records on the conference. But you brush aside this powerful mountain of evidence and rely on a single unsourced statement in a book about the Vietnam War. Yes, the unsourced statement is indeed "buried." Have you read it in its original context, or are you going by how Prouty misleadingly quotes it? It is in the middle of a long paragraph, and it is not even the topic of the paragraph, much less the book. And, sheesh, just because Gibbons' book was done for a Congressional subcommittee does not make it "authoritative." You must be kidding. Gee, is the Warren Report "authoritative" because it was done for the U.S. Government and was overseen by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court? Gibbons clearly simply confused and conflated the Cairo Conference with the Tehran Conference. This is obvious. It is also understandable. Gibbons was not writing about the Tehran Conference or Chiang, but about the Vietnam War. These kinds of errors sometimes creep into a book when the author is making a brief comment about a peripheral subject that is not the focus of the book. Why are all the other scholars who've written about Chiang and/or the Tehran Conference wrong and Gibbons' single unsourced statement right? I've cited and quoted from book-length studies on the Cairo and Tehran conferences that specify that Chiang only attended the Cairo Conference and that he returned to China after leaving Cairo. Yet, you rely on a single unsourced statement and ignore all other sources. Furthermore, I have also proved that the subject of Mao's military operations was never even discussed at the Tehran Conference. I have also proved that Prouty's Tehran-trip story is full of holes. I have further proved that Chiang's own diary and his wife's 12/5/43 letter to FDR refute Prouty's mythmaking. But you just don't care because you are oddly determined to believe Prouty's nonsense no matter what.

Anyone who wants to believe that the Zapruder film is pristine needs to explain the impossible human movements and the other impossible events now contained in the film. Believers in the pristine Z film must also assume that 40-plus witnesses, from all over the plaza, had the same mass hallucination when they said the limo stopped or markedly slowed. The extant film shows only a split-second slowdown that can only be detected when the film is played in very slow motion and carefully analyzed.

Jeff did provide info about the Tehran Conference and that was pages ago. Uh, I soundly refuted that "info." The "info" was a single unsourced sentence buried in a paragraph about a different subject in a book about U.S. Government policy and the Vietnam War. The author clearly confused and conflated the Cairo Conference and the Tehran Conference. So then, whenever one replies to one of these charges, Mike goes to another one. What??? Uh, I responded to Jeff's reply. Compare his lone item of dubious evidence on Prouty's Tehran claim with the numerous sources that I cited. Did you even read my responses to his replies? You are badly damaging your credibility with these kinds of erroneous replies in defense of an anti-Semitic crackpot. Diverting from the fact just established. Ha! This is comical. He established no fact. He cited a lone, obviously errant and unsourced statement. I cited numerous scholarly sources, including many primary sources. But somehow you conclude that he made the better case. Curious. And make no mistake, virtually all of these were brought up by McAdams in the first place. You can check that for yourself. And almost all of them were replied to by Len Osanic years ago. One, I've raised many issues that McAdams never mentioned. Two, just because McAdams said something does not automatically make it false. Are you saying McAdams was wrong about Ricky White, Robert Morrow, Beverly Oliver, and Madeleine Brown, for example? Three, Osanic's explanations for Prouty's bogus claims and craziness are lame. And, I must say that Jeff's excuses and explanations for Prouty's documented, undeniable prolonged associations with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers are just pitiful. As I've said many times, if we had the same evidence on a lone-gunman theorist, no conspiracy advocate be caught dead offering such excuses and explanations.

I think Shepard shows pretty clearly who triggered Watergate and why. Yes, some GOP leaders urged Nixon to resign, but that was only because they were deceived by the false claims about the alleged "smoking gun" White House tape. If they had known the truth about the tape, I suspect they would have ardently defended Nixon. Also, Nixon and Kissinger did not want out of Vietnam in the way that the anti-war Congress wanted out of Vietnam. They wanted to continue robust military and economic aid, and they wanted to be able to keep their promise to provide air support if North Vietnam seriously violated the peace accords. I think it is going way too far to call Nixon a war criminal for what he did in SE Asia. He did his best to save 18 million South Vietnamese and 7 million Cambodians from Communist brutality. Truman authorized far deadlier bombing of North Korea than Nixon ever authorized of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. For that matter, FDR authorized unbelievably vicious bombing of Japan and Germany, bombing that dwarfed Nixon's bombing of North Vietnam in terms of the types of targets and the degree of destruction. Indeed, FDR wanted the A-bomb so he could nuke Nazi Germany.

Until fairly recently, I resisted Bart Kamp's conclusions because I thought that the police and/or the FBI would not have been dumb enough to invent the second-floor Oswald-Baker encounter due to the severe problems it poses for the lone-gunman theory. But, the more I've thought about it, and the more I've reviewed Kamp's research, the more I have come to see that he has a strong case and that the second-floor encounter may well have been fabricated. I am going to markedly revise my article "Where Was Oswald During the Shooting?" in light of Kamp's research.

And we wonder why so many academics and journalists view the JFKA conspiracy case as being as bizarre and implausible as the theories about fake Moon landings, 9/11 being an inside job, a missile hitting the Pentagon on 9/11, the Holocaust being a Jewish propaganda hoax, Princess Diana being assassinated by British intelligence, etc., etc.

You post this pitiful reply after I just presented new evidence of another Prouty whopper. Can you find me one shred of evidence that Ibn Saud took part in the Cairo Conference? You're the one who keeps posting "debunked claims." Any rational, objective reader who reads this thread will be amazed at your refusal to acknowledge the facts about Prouty. BTW, where are the pictures that Prouty claimed he took of the Chinese delegation during his fictional trip to Tehran?