Michael Griffith

Sorry, but this won't work. Prouty did more than serve as an expert witness for Scientology/Hubbard, although that in itself was bad enough. Prouty also wrote letters attacking Hubbard's critics. As former Scientology cult member Tony Ortega has noted, "Prouty was a master of the 'noisy investigation,' and made vicious allegations against anyone who criticized Hubbard" (https://tonyortega.org/2016/09/10/laying-to-rest-the-obfuscations-of-l-fletcher-prouty-scientologys-conspiracist-for-hire/). Please read Ortega's article. He shows that Prouty had no clue what he was talking about regarding Hubbard's Navy personnel records. Prouty made the ludicrous claim that Hubbard served under "deep cover" in Navy intelligence and that his records were doctored to conceal this. Prouty's only "evidence" for this claim was (1) the fact that the number "16" appeared on some pages of Hubbard's records and (2) the fact that in one place Hubbard's records identified him as an "intelligence officer." But "16" simply referred to naval reservist duty, and the "intelligence officer" reference merely referred to Hubbard's work as a mail censor. Even worse than Prouty's work for the Scientology cult and his defense of a crook and crackpot like Hubbard was Prouty's association with Liberty Lobby, a group that promoted Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. In my early 20s, having no clue what Liberty Lobby was, I attended a Liberty Lobby presentation in Portland, Oregon, with two friends. I realized I'd made a huge mistake when the featured speaker began to argue that the Holocaust never happened. Prouty actually served on one of Liberty Lobby's advisory boards and allowed the IHR Holocaust-minimizing Noontide Press to publish his book The Secret Team. Are you kidding me? Seriously, are you kidding me? And you're still defending this guy? When his Liberty Lobby and IHR-Noontide Press connections came to light, Prouty, incredibly and unbelievably, claimed he had no idea that Liberty Lobby and Noontide Press were anti-Semitic and that they disputed the Holocaust! If my 20-year-old self could figure out that Liberty Lobby was anti-Semitic and denied the Holocaust, surely Prouty had to know this as well. If he really didn't know, this seriously calls into question his competence, judgment, and intelligence. Go read just a few of the issues of Liberty Lobby's weekly newspaper The Spotlight. You'll find article after article attacking the Jews, attacking Israel, claiming an international Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, claiming that the Jews controlled the American press, servings of favorable treatment of neo-National Socialist groups in Germany, etc., etc. You know how I know this? Because when I arrived at the above-mentioned Liberty Lobby meeting, having no clue what it was all about, there was a booth at the entrance that was offering free four-week trial subscriptions to The Spotlight, and I innocently signed up for my free trial. Needless to say, I declined to get a paid subscription after receiving the four free issues. You guys keep talking about Prouty's military career and all his medals. Again, General Curtis LeMay, arguably one of the biggest mass murderers in the history of warfare, received many awards and commendations and retired as the Air Force Chief of Staff, the highest position in the Air Force. There are several Air Force buildings named after LeMay. General Hap Arnold, who ordered the brutal and criminal fire bombings of Japanese cities, and who chose LeMay to carry them out, likewise had a "distinguished military career" and received numerous medals and awards. Or, take Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Except for a single letter of reprimand, McVeigh had a distinguished military career. McVeigh was promoted quickly, received numerous awards (including the Bronze Star and the NDSM), served in the Gulf War, was accepted for the elite Special Forces (Green Berets) school, and received an honorable discharge.

Thank you for the follow-up. Very interesting and informative.

Prouty's employment with the Scientology cult and his embarrassing and bogus defense of L. Ron Hubbard are not "extraneous subjects" but speak directly to his judgment, character, and credibility. I just find it unbelievable that anyone is still defending Prouty after all we now know about him.

I haven't read Buzzanco's book Masters of War, but I have read his book Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Blackwell Publishers, 1999), which is genuinely awful. I've also read two of his post-1999 online articles. In his book, he whitewashes the Viet Cong and paints Ho Chi Minh as a mere nationalist. He repeats every major myth of the anti-war movement about the war, about U.S. troops, about North Vietnam, about the Viet Cong, etc. Not surprisingly, Noam Chomsky praised the book. Buzzanco ignores the reign of terror that the Communists imposed on South Vietnam after Saigon fell. To read his book and his post-1999 online articles, you'd never know it occurred. In his 1999 book and in his post-1999 online articles, Buzzanco, like nearly all other liberal scholars, says nothing about the important information disclosed in the North Vietnamese sources that began to be available/released by the early 2000s. For that matter, in his 1999 book, he says nothing about the North Vietnamese sources that were available as of the mid-1980s, such as Truong Nhu Tang's important and revealing book A Viet Cong Memoir.

So the account that Bobby went to LBJ and asked him to let the operation go forward is wrong? I'll have to look into this. Waldron's case seems solid and detailed, with over 80 pages of discussion on the scheduled coup. But, looks can be deceiving. I'll check out the link you provided in another reply. Are there any other online articles available that present and document the information you've presented? I'd like to read more on this. Thank you for the heads-up. If you are correct and Waldron got his facts confused as you say, I'm glad I haven't put anything on my JFK website about this.

Jim, can you please email me (michael.t.griffith@gmail.com)? I need to ask you something offline. I tried to message you, but the Ed Forum software says your account can't receive messages. Thanks.

That is a fascinating article. I am a total layman when it comes to this stuff, so I will withhold judgment. Speaking for myself, I still get vaccinated against tetanus when my doctor says it's time to do so. I got the COVID-19 vaccine and the shingles vaccine. Anyway, I do notice that the article is not arguing that all vaccination should cease forever but that vaccination should be made safer and that the issue of harmful side effects should be studied more objectively. I do know that there is some basis for reasonable caution about some vaccines. For example, in April 1955 more than 200,000 children in five states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus was defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first polio vaccination program had to be abandoned. Even the CDC admits that from 1955 to 1963 "an estimated 10-30% of polio vaccines administered in the US were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40). The virus came from monkey kidney cell cultures used to make polio vaccines at that time. Most of the contamination was in the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), but it was also found in oral polio vaccine (OPV)." I remember the resistance to the anthrax vaccine while I was in the Army. I heard and read many stories about servicemembers who experienced serious side effects from the vaccine. I had two friends who suffered severe side effects soon after their final dosage. One of them got a giant rash on his head and the other began suffering short-term memory loss. When my friend with the head rash went to the medical clinic, the doctor refused to identify the rash as a side effect of the vaccine. As of the last time I saw both of them, the one still had the rash and the other still suffered from short-term memory loss. In any event, I say again that RFK Jr. needs to explain his previous comments about vaccination and make clear his current position on the subject. The establishment will hang this issue around his neck until he credibly addresses it.

You are the one who needs to learn the evidence here. Whaley picked the No. 2 guy in the lineup: Mr. WHALEY. No, sir; I did not. They asked me which number he was standing under and he was standing under No. 2. (2 H 294) Oswald was standing under No. 3. Knapp was standing under No. 2 (7 H 200). As for the jacket issue, said Whaley: He was dressed in just ordinary work clothes. It wasn't khaki pants but they were khaki material, blue faded, blue color, like a blue uniform made in khaki. (2 H 253-255) But, a bit later, he changed his mind: Mr. BALL. Here is Commission No. 162 which is a gray jacket with zipper. Mr. WHALEY. I think that is the jacket he had on when he rode with me in the cab. Mr. BALL. Look something like it? And here is Commission Exhibit No. 163, does this look like anything he had on? Mr. WHALEY. He had this one on or the other one. (2 H 260) Go read his testimony. He was all over the place about the jacket's color and other clothing. And any competent defense attorney would have shredded any attempt to have "Oswald" getting in Whaley's cab at 12:47. The WC's 15-minute-increment explanation is bogus. Whaley's log proves he followed no such practice in logging his times.

Gerry, sorry for the delayed response. Yes, the Vietnam War has been a research interest of mine for a long time. I became interested in the Vietnam War long before I began studying the JFK case. I've maintained a website on the Vietnam War for many years (LINK). I would guess I've read about 70 books on the war and at least 100 articles. I've also read scores of primary sources on the war, most of which are available on government websites (such as the DTIC website). Three of my top five books on "JFK and Vietnam" are broader in scope than the narrow issue of JFK's withdrawal plan and his post-1963 intentions. They mainly deal with what was happening with the war while Kennedy was in office. With this understood, my top five books are as follows: -- Dr. Marc Selverstone, The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard University Press, November 2022). This is the most comprehensive study of JFK's withdrawal plan and his views about the war. The wide range of scholars who have praised the book speaks for itself. -- Dr. Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). One of the important things that Moyar documents, partly with newly released/newly available North Vietnamese sources, is that the officials who were telling JFK that the war was hopeless, that the war was going terribly, that Diem had to be replaced, etc., were the ones who were misleading him. The officials who were telling JFK that the war was not hopeless, that progress was being made, and that Diem was doing a decent job under the circumstances--they were the ones who were telling him the truth (or at least were giving him information that was more accurate than what he was getting from the other side). A little bit about Dr. Moyar: He earned his B.A. in history from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. From 2018 to 2019, he served as the Director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Previously, he directed the Project on Military and Diplomatic History at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University. He also taught at the U.S. Marine Corps University, the Joint Special Operations University, and Texas A&M University. He joined Hillsdale College in 2021 as the William P. Harris Chair in Military History. -- Dr. Geoffrey Shaw, The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem (Ignatius Press, 2015). Shaw, a Canadian historian, makes extensive use of newly released/newly available North Vietnamese sources. He examines in exhaustive detail the standard attacks on Diem. His 19-page chapter on the situation in Laos during JFK's presidency is one of the best analyses of the subject ever published, if not the best. Ditto for his chapter on the Buddhist protests. Shaw's book is also valuable because of the insight it provides about the political machinations that were going on among American officials in South Vietnam and the conflicting messages they were sending to the White House and the State Department. Another valuable aspect of the book is that Shaw makes use of British diplomatic and military sources who were in South Vietnam at the time. -- Bui Diem, In the Jaws of History (Houghton Mifflin, 1987, reprinted by Indiana University Press, 1999). As many scholars have observed, this is an indispensable book on the Vietnam War. Any Vietnam War 101 course would certainly include this book as required reading. The first 14 chapters cover the period from the Japanese occupation of Vietnam to the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963. Bui Diem had firsthand knowledge and insight about South Vietnam during JFK's presidency, specifically, about the Viet Cong, the situation on the ground in 1962 and 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem's rule, the presence of American forces in South Vietnam, North Vietnamese infiltration, the Buddhist protests, the political/diplomatic machinations in Saigon, and many other issues. A little bit about Bui Diem: He founded the Saigon Post. He was close to many leading figures in the Saigon government. He was the nephew of one of South Vietnam's first prime ministers. He later became South Vietnam's ambassador to the U.S., serving in that capacity from 1966 until South Vietnam fell in 1975. After the war, he became a research professor at George Mason University. He was also a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the American Enterprise Institute. He was interviewed extensively by Stanley Karnow for the 1983 documentary Vietnam: A Television History (he was very unhappy with the documentary and with how Karnow used--or misused--his interview). -- Dr. John Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (Grand Central Pub, 1992). Obviously, we all know this was a ground-breaking book in several respects. It is full of important information that should have come out years earlier. Three of its major shortcomings are (1) that Newman focused on sources relating to Vietnam policy and internal debates/machinations without placing those items in the broader context of the actual situation in South Vietnam, (2) that Newman incorrectly assumed that those who were giving JFK a negative picture of the war effort were the ones who were telling him the truth, and (3) that he failed to use any of the North Vietnamese sources that were then available, such as Truong Nhu Tang's A Viet Cong Memoir (1986)--although, to be fair, the majority of such sources did not become widely available until after Newman's book was published. Crucially, Newman forced scholars to seriously discuss the Kennedy withdrawal plan, whereas previously many scholars had regarded the plan as a myth or gross exaggeration peddled by Kennedy diehards after his death.

Dr. Edward Moise, a decidedly liberal scholar on the Vietnam War, says the following about the Kennedy withdrawal and the aides who later claimed that JFK told them he was going to abandon the war after the election: The contemporary records of the Kennedy administration give a pretty clear picture of planning for a withdrawal that was conditional on the war going well. By far the best evidence that Kennedy had made a decision to withdraw even if the war went badly--to abandon Vietnam--was in the memories of a few of his associates, who said, years after his death, that they remembered his having told them that he had decided to abandon the war. This reviewer has never found these witnesses’ testimony convincing; it is too difficult to reconcile their memories of Kennedy’s thinking with the picture one gets from contemporary records. (H-Diplo Article Review No. 265c) Historian Scott Racek on the movie JFK , NSAM 273, and Kennedy's withdrawal plan: There are several historical inaccuracies with this conversation. While it makes great moviemaking, there was no conversation between Garrison and an “X”. The closest person to matching X is Col. L. Fletcher Prouty USAF (Ret.), who wrote the book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy and from whom Stone has taken most of his material. . . . While Prouty did work with some of the same people who formulated the withdrawal plan, there is no evidence that he himself worked on it. The memo to which Prouty refers is National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 273. This memo did not give a timetable for leaving Vietnam, but recommended that if South Vietnam was able to support their own operations the Americans would leave. It is historical fantasy for Stone to argue that the troop withdrawal was going to happen definitively and without caveats. JFK also highlights the reaction of the military to the pullout decision. It further assumes that Johnson was allied to the military industrial complex. Neither of these facts holds up under scrutiny. An earlier version of NSC Memo 273 was created on November 21, 1963, while Kennedy was still alive and was expected to sign once he returned from his Texas trip. This earlier version, says, in part: "We should concentrate our own efforts, and insofar as possible we should persuade the Government of South Vietnam to concentrate its efforts, on the critical situation in the Mekong Delta. This concentration should include not only military but political, economic, social, educational and informational effort. We should seek to turn the tide not only of battle but of belief, and we should seek to increase not only our control of land but the productivity of this area wherever the proceeds can be held for the advantage of anti-Communist forces." Rather than discussing an active pullout in the memo, it predicts a higher level of commitment. When X claims that the Vietnam War lay in NSC memo 273, it was based on a document initially drafted under Kennedy. . . . About the potential pullout McNamara says [on the White House tapes] “…we can say to the Congress and people that we have a plan for reducing the exposure of U.S. combat personnel.” Kennedy responds: “(M)y only reservation about this is, if the war doesn’t continue to go well it will look like we were overly optimistic.” This statement reveals not only the challenging nature of Vietnam as early as 1963 (when there was an increase to sixteen thousand advisors in the country), but it also reflects the fact that pullout was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. It does reveal that Kennedy and McNamara were potentially trying to find a way out of Vietnam. But both knew that that pullout was not without serious political ramifications. And while one thousand troops were sent home in December 1963, Karnow [another decidedly liberal scholar] argues, “…their departure was essentially a bureaucratic accounting exercise." They were not sent home as a precursor for a larger withdrawal. In the next scene, McNamara repeats the charge that Kennedy was going to pull all troops out by the end of 1965. He claims that Kennedy had essentially “announced” the withdrawal of U.S. troops by drafting NSC 273, when in fact, Kennedy was implying the opposite. There is more evidence to support the argument that Kennedy was going to continue U.S. presence in the region. This is seen in the minutes from that National Security Council Meeting. It was McNamara and General Taylor who suggested that the military could finish their ‘mission’ by 1965. This ‘mission’ was solely to train the South Vietnamese military for battle against the North and NLF. It was not to fight the war on their behalf. Indeed, whether South Vietnamese troops would be ready for this responsibility was an open question in 1963. . . . Finishing the mission by 1965 was more wishful thinking than reality. Moreover, if Kennedy was interested in avoiding further escalation, why would he have implicitly agreed to the removal of Diem? It seems that if Kennedy had wanted to disengage, he would have washed his hands of the country once the coup occurred. Kennedy had publicly proclaimed in July of 1963 “in my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort [in Vietnam] would mean a collapse not only of South Vietnam, but Southeast Asia, so we are going to stay there.” While this may have been posturing, it would have been hypocritical for Kennedy to make such a strong point and then pull out. Kennedy also made a public statement in an interview with Walter Cronkite in September of 1963 in which he argued: "I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. . . . [I]n the final analysis it is the people and the Government [of South Vietnam] itself who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help, and we are making it very clear. But 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." While it is certainly possible that Kennedy could have said one thing publicly and another privately, to put himself in that corner plainly points to Kennedy keeping troops beyond 1964. Overall, in his term, Kennedy increased the number of advisors in Vietnam from nine hundred to sixteen thousand and thirty. He substantially enlarged the number of Special Forces (specifically Green Berets). Kennedy believed that using counter-insurgency troops and tactics was the best way to deal with the “Vietnam thing”. This commitment to irregular troops was designed to show the South Vietnamese that the United States was there to help them. It was not a commitment to leaving. (JFKChapter12R.pdf)

Humm, well, Clarence Thomas showed bad judgment in accepting the luxury trips from Harlan Crow. When Thomas and his wife went on the trips, he was not technically or specifically required to report them as part of his annual financial disclosure statement, but he should have done so anyway. All this being said, I hope nobody is suggesting that Thomas harbors any sympathy for the Third Reich or N-azism. Nothing in his writings or history lends the slightest credence to such a belief.

Oh my goodness. You must be kidding. How can you post such nonsense after all we now know about the supposed "positive identifications," Oswald's movements, etc.? Those "positive identifications" were a joke. They would have been shredded in a trial. The prosecution probably would not have even used many of them because they were so obviously suspect and questionable. Just a few examples: -- William Scoggins selected the wrong photo when asked to identify Oswald from photos after the police lineup (3 H 335). Law enforcement agents asked Scoggins to pick Oswald from among various photos following the lineup. After Scoggins made his selection, the agent showing him the pictures told him "the other one was Oswald" (3 H 335). -- Before Helen Markham knew what she was supposed to say, when she was interviewed by an FBI agent on 11/22, she stated that Tippit's killer had a "red complexion." Oswald was lily white, if not downright pale. Markham also said that Tippit's killer was a bit heavy and had slightly bushy hair. Oswald was quite thin and had straight, short hair. Markham made the ludicrous claim that 20 minutes elapsed after the shooting before anyone else arrived at the scene. Even in her WC testimony, Markham required obvious leading and prompting to say she had identified Oswald, after she repeatedly said she had been unable to recognize anyone in the police lineup. -- William Smith initially told a friend that he had been at the Tippit scene and that the gunman was not Oswald. When the FBI questioned Smith about this, he said that he initially did not think the gunman was Oswald because when he first saw Oswald on TV after the assassination it looked like Oswald had light-colored hair. Huh? I've watched all of the post-assassination TV footage of Oswald, and I would invite anyone to find a clip from that footage in which Oswald seems to have light-colored hair. (Of course, Smith might not have said this--we have only the word of the FBI agent who interviewed him that he in fact gave this explanation). Given the fact that Smith got a good look at the killer, one would think he would have been able to base his initial opinion on more than just the appearance of the man's hair on a black-and-white TV screen. -- William Whaley, who supposedly drove Oswald from downtown Dallas to his neighborhood, testified that Oswald "had on two jackets" while he was allegedly in Whaley's cab. Whaley's "identification" of Oswald at the police lineup was questionable. Although at one point Whaley told the WC that he selected Oswald, he also repeatedly insisted that he selected the No. 2 man and that the man he selected was the third man to come out into the lineup. The No. 2 man, the man who came out third into the lineup, was not Oswald but was an eighteen-year-old named David Knapp. Whaley also gave contradictory testimony about his police statement. The first statement taken from Whaley, handwritten by Officer Montgomery, said nothing about Whaley having chosen the No. 3 man (Oswald was the No. 3 man). Whaley registered 12:30 p.m. in his logbook as the time when his passenger entered the cab. This, of course, eliminated Oswald, since Oswald was in the Depository building at that time. The WC attempted to explain this by claiming that Whaley recorded all trips in fifteen-minute intervals, regardless of how long the actual trip took. Since the Commission decided Oswald entered the cab at 12:47 or 12:48, it did not explain why Whaley entered 12:30 instead of 12:45 in his book. Nor did it explain why other trips were entered at 6:20, 7:50, 8:10, 9:40, 10:50, and 3:10, rather than regular quarter-hour intervals. And on and on we could go.

If Goldwater had been JFK's opponent in 1964, I would tend to agree with you. But if JFK had had to go up against Nixon or Rockefeller in '64, I think he might well have lost, especially against Nixon.

Well, as I've said, RFK Jr. needs to explain his current view on vaccination and explain his previous statements on the subject, and he needs to do it quickly, or else hit pieces like this one will continue. He is very vulnerable on this issue right now. As for the 2004 election, the Rolling Stone article is interesting. When I saw you reference it, my first thought was that it was probably a bunch of far-fetched speculation with little or no supporting evidence. But, on its face, it seems to present some disturbing evidence of substantial election fraud. Just FYI, there is far more evidence of election fraud in the 2020 election, much of it along the same lines as those covered in the Rolling Stone article. I'm one who happens to believe that the U.S. Supreme Court's 2000 Bush v. Gore ruling, though absolutely correct on the facts, was an unjustified and unnecessary judicial intervention. The FL legislature was fully prepared to overrule any cherry-picked recount and had the full legal right under the Constitution to do so. There was no need for the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved.

He definitely needs to clarify his views on vaccination and to address his previous comments on the subject. This issue is not going to go away, especially if his campaign starts to gain any kind of traction. If he is able to participate in the debates, this issue will definitely come up, and he'd better have some clear, cogent responses when it does. We need to keep in mind that most voters have no memory of JFK or RFK or the Camelot mystique, etc. Some voters do remember Ted Kennedy, but that is not necessarily a good thing, given Chappaquiddick and his unfortunate conduct in the 1980 Dem primary. For most voters, RFK Jr. will be just another candidate, and a minor candidate at that. If he cannot effectively explain his previous anti-vaccination comments and credible clarify his views on the subject, he will have no chance of getting the nomination.

We get back once again to your rabid far-left ideology where you see anyone who disagrees with you as the enemy and cannot deal with certain issues objectively because doing so would require you to abandon some long-held far-left myths. I say that Selverstone is a Kennedy admirer because he most certainly is. The fact that you would accuse me of bias for noting this fact only shows that you have no clue what you are talking about. Why don't you read Selverstone's introduction in his edited compilation A Companion to John F. Kennedy and then come back and tell me he is not a JFK admirer? You fault Selverstone for his passing comment that JFK's support of civil rights was "halting." You even call this brief observation "loony." Good heavens. This is further proof that you have no business passing judgment on these matters in a public forum. Far from being "loony," Selverstone's passing comment has been echoed at much greater length by scholars from all across the political spectrum. I could literally fill many pages with statements from black civil rights activists who have attacked JFK for not doing nearly enough in their eyes. Julian Bond accused JFK of being a "do nothing" president on civil rights. Yes, JFK did more than FDR, Truman, or Ike, but that is not saying a great deal. Selverstone's passing comment about JFK's civil rights policy is valid, but you have not done enough reading to know that. You say that JFK was not a Cold Warrior. You ignore the voluminous evidence that proves that JFK most certainly was a Cold Warrior, and that he believed firmly in the Domino Theory. I should add that you ignore 99% of the evidence that Selverstone presents on this issue. JFK was not the pro-colonialist Cold Warrior that Ike and the Dulles brothers were, but he most certainly was a Cold Warrior. The problem is not that Selverstone "completely distorts books he has read in order to make that phony judgment." The problem is that your reading has been so limited and one sided that you don't realize that Selverstone's point is indisputably valid and massively documented. In your Kennedys and King review, you incorrectly claim that Selverstone uses Rakove's book Kennedy, Johnson, and the Non-Aligned World in an effort to "turn Kennedy into a Cold Warrior." Anyone who reads the page in question (p. 18) will see that this is not true, that Selverstone only cites Rakove regarding a specific point about JFK's views on neutralism in the context of the Domino Theory, which you seemingly admit in the introductory clause to your attack, but then you go on to portray his use of Rakove as misleading. Regarding JFK and a neutral approach in Vietnam, you wave aside Selverstone's evidence and rely on a single page from a book written by 9/11 Truther James Douglass. Seriously??? Yes, JFK did ignore Ike's (very sound) advice on Laos, and opted for a supposedly "neutral" solution, but that approach quickly proved to be a terrible blunder, and in the following years that blunder cost many thousands of American and South Vietnamese lives. The Chinese and the North Vietnamese ignored the neutrality deal, and the North Vietnamese seized firm control of the crucial southeastern sector of the country, which later included a key part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. People who read your Kennedys and King review of Selverstone's book, and who read Selverstone's book, will notice immediately that you have simply ignored a vast amount of the evidence that Selverstone presents. You typically cite one or two bits of evidence for your argument on an issue; then you ignore most or all of the evidence that Selverstone presents on the issue; and then you act like you've refuted Selverstone's point. It is unbelievable that in your Kennedys and King review, you once again repeat your far-left claim about the 1954 Geneva Accords, namely, that "those peace accords were shattered in 1956 when Eisenhower refused to conduct the national elections which were to unify Vietnam, after a division that was only temporary." This is an inexcusable repetition of Communist propaganda. Even Max Hastings dismisses this argument. You obviously chose to ignore the evidence that I presented to you on this issue in our discussion on the Vietnam War in another thread, such as the fact that even Senator John F. Kennedy argued against holding those elections. We've known for many years now, thanks in part to newly released/newly available North Vietnamese sources, that the North Vietnamese had no intention of honoring the Geneva Accords and viewed them only as a necessary evil to give them time to prepare to attack South Vietnam. And, as Max Hastings has noted, the North Vietnamese severely violated the Accords from the outset, long before Diem's refusal to hold the 1956 elections. This brings up the point that Diem was the one who refused to hold the elections, not Eisenhower. Ike opposed holding the elections, as did JFK, but he was not the one who refused to hold them. That decision was Diem's to make, and Diem needed no convincing from Eisenhower on the subject. Finally, in your review, you repeat the claim that Kennedy’s withdrawal plan was unconditional. You don't lay a finger on Selverstone's evidence against this claim--in fact, you ignore it. Moreover, you fail to mention that even James Galbraith, whom you cite as support for the unconditional-withdrawal claim, has acknowledged that the withdrawal plan called for continued aid to South Vietnam and for leaving behind some support troops for supply purposes, as I have documented in this thread and in other threads.

Black radicals such as Julian Bond have been harshly critical of JFK for supposedly not doing enough for civil rights. This is draconian, misguided, and unfair criticism. Given the politics and conditions during his presidency, JFK showed great courage in speaking and acting in favor of civil rights. He said and did more than Nixon would have done. If JFK had lived to run in 1964, his pro-civil rights statements and actions would have cost him dearly in the southern states. Even in LBJ's 1964 landslide win, Goldwater, one of the worst candidates in our history, won MS, AL, LA, GA, and SC. If JFK had not been shot and had run 1964, and if the GOP had nominated a better candidate, such as Nixon or Rockefeller, JFK's support of civil rights might well have cost him the election, even though his support would be considered mediocre and even timid by today's standards.

RFK Jr. is way off base on the "FedNow" CBDC issue, and the two ladies in the video segment don't seem to understand it either. For starters, FedNow is not the same thing as CBDC. They are two separate things. FedNow is not related to a digital currency. FedNow is a payments service that the Federal Reserve is making available for banks and credit unions to transfer funds. It is like other Federal Reserve payments services, such as Fedwire and FedACH. The FedNow Service is neither a form of currency nor a step toward eliminating any form of payment, including cash. It will shorten the time it takes banks to send funds to other banks. Now that he's a candidate, RFK Jr. needs to get an adviser who understands financial matters. If he had had a trained financial consultant before he issued his unfortunate statement, that person could have informed him that FedNow has nothing to do with CBDC. RFK Jr. is going to have to thoroughly address his previous comments about vaccines, or he's going to continue to get cheap shots like Jake Tapper's "quack" remark.

Yes, JFK's scheduled early December coup attempt is discussed in detail in investigative journalist Lamar Waldron's 2013 book The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (pp. 206-382, 401-475).

I think that's going way too far. For all of Livingstone's faults, he did a great deal of solid, important research on the case, especially on the medical evidence. He conducted a lot of valuable interviews with key witnesses and experts. And people forget how many times Livingstone rejected various conspiracy claims because he correctly found them wanting.

I'm sorry, but you are simply not qualified to be passing this kind of judgment on Dr. Selverstone's book. One, your reading on the Vietnam War has been sparse and very one sided, as is apparent from your replies to me on the Vietnam War in other threads, where you repeated claims that were debunked years ago (some of them were debunked literally decades ago), and where you cited far-left books that even many liberal scholars recognize as problematic. You cited Nick Turse's scandalous book, which even Neil Sheehan condemned as shoddy, and you were unaware that Turse and his publisher were forced to issue a retraction when confronted with indisputable evidence of falsehood in the book. You obviously had never heard of any of the important disclosures from released/newly translated North Vietnamese sources (because far-left authors have ignored them). Two, you approach the issue of the Vietnam War from a rigidly ideological perspective that seems to render you incapable of being objective on the subject. When I first told you about Selverstone's book, you said the book would not be credible because you believed that Selverstone was a right-winger, since he works at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, when in fact Selverstone is a JFK admirer and a centrist. The mere fact that you would attack a book you hadn't read because you believed the author was a conservative says volumes about your own political bias. Selverstone's book is superior to Newman's solid book, partly because he uses sources that Newman did not use (some of them were not available yet). Also, Selverstone addresses Newman's key arguments. Newman's book is a solid, credible work and contains important information not covered in previous books on the subject, but Selverstone's book is a cut above any other book on JFK and Vietnam published to date. Scholars from all across the spectrum on the Vietnam War have praised Selverstone's book, yet you conclude that it is "a piece of rubbish." REALLY??? A "piece of rubbish"??? Honestly, such a comment shows that you really have no business passing judgment on the book in a public forum. I can only imagine how you are going to deal with (i.e., casually dismiss or ignore) the mountain of evidence that Selverstone presents in his book. The problem is that you are so inadequately read on the war, so ideologically rigid, and so emotionally committed to the far-left version of the war, that you are in no position to fairly and credibly judge Selverstone's scholarship. You have done great work on the JFK case. Some of your JFKA research has been historic and outstanding. But, when it comes to the Vietnam War and JFK's Vietnam policy, you are out of your depth.

August 2013. It was partially reprinted on the HNN website in September 2013: JFK vs. the Military | History News Network (hnn.us)

When you post a link, it would be helpful if you would provide a brief summary of the contents. Anyway, I find it curious and puzzling that LBJ cancelled the coup attempt in Cuba that JFK had scheduled for early December, even though Bobby urged LBJ to let the coup attempt proceed as scheduled. For many years, I believed that the plotters intended to use the assassination as an excuse to carry out an invasion of Cuba. But, when I learned that JFK had approved a carefully planned and credible coup attempt against Castro for early December and that LBJ cancelled it over Bobby's objections, I had to reassess my thinking.

As I've said many times in online discussions, if WC apologists want to prove that the backyard photos are authentic, all they have to do is either (1) duplicate the variant shadows in valid and realistic conditions, or (2) conduct a reenactment where an IR camera is handed back and forth to forward the film between exposures and where the resulting pictures have only microscopic differences in the distances between the objects in the backgrounds. So far, neither event has occurred. When Norman Mailer claimed in Oswald's Tale that Lawrence Schiller had duplicated the variant shadows in a reenactment, he declined to include any of the photos from Schiller's reenactment. When I finally got Schiller to send me one of the pictures from his reenactment, it was quickly apparent that the photo did not show a duplication of the variant shadows--in fact, it showed the opposite. When I wrote Mailer and Schiller about the photo, neither of them replied. When the HSCA PEP could find only "very small" (their term) differences in the distances between the background objects in the photos, surely it must have occurred to them that it was extremely unlikely x 10 that the photos were taken in the manner that Marina claimed they were taken. Mr. Mee pointed out that it would be difficult even for a professional photographer using an automatic camera, much less the IR camera, to take three photos that would have such virtually identical backgrounds.

BTW, my last name is Griffith, not Griffin. You can't even get that simple fact straight. You are a dream come true for lone-gunman theorists. They love it when people who posit a conspiracy in the JFK case go off the deep end with nutty claims and bizarre theories, as you do. You are immune to fact and logic when it comes to Prouty. You still have not provided a substantive answer to a single point I've made about Prouty's false assertions, his phony credentials, and his association with undisputed crackpots and extremists. Tony Ortega proved that Prouty did a lot more than just make "a few comments" about Hubbard's military records. That's a royal dodge. Ortega proved, among several other things that you ignore, that Prouty's self-proclaimed expertise in understanding military records was nonexistent, that Prouty had no clue what he was talking about. Ortega also proved that Prouty's claim that Hubbard worked in deep-cover naval intelligence was baseless and absurd. But you won't admit anything when it comes to Prouty. And, by the way, what in the devil was Prouty doing defending such a nutcase and fraud as Hubbard in the first place? Do you know anything about what a kook and crook Hubbard was? Doesn't it raise a giant red flag in your mind that Prouty would defend a nutjob like Hubbard and would take money from the Scientology cult to do so? I guess not.