James Wilkinson

Douglass's prose felt almost lyrical, infused with the passion of a lifelong activist. You don't get that with most well-researched tomes on the topic, to be sure. Some neurotic part of me will always be triggered from the threat of a "Medill-F" grade in any NU j-school class for even a single error, however trivial. This predisposes me toward Weisberg's admonition about avoiding any unsourced conclusions that could undercut a researcher's credibility. His beautiful "bowery bum" line notwithstanding, Weisberg was def more of a what-he-says than how-he-says-it guy. To put it gently. I try to come down on the side of letting a thousand flowers bloom. We're never gonna be able to control one another anyway. Diversity of tactics and all that too. At the same time, I draw my own line at common cause with white nationalists in 2022. (There are more than a thousand flowers, after all.) That's a bedrock, principled stand for me, and Carlson's replacement theory rhetoric is as undeniable as it is beyond the pale. We'll see what happens! If any tangible, lasting good does come out of Carlson's segment(s), I suppose I could look no more askance at that than Weisberg could at the ARRB doc dumps that never would've happened had it not been for the Stone film he himself had fought against with every fiber of his being.

Yeah. Unspeakable actually sources enough credible evidence for me to be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that JFK was pulling out of Vietnam and that Oswald was a patsy. Much of that evidence had already persuaded me beyond the preponderance or clear and convincing standards when portions of it had been reported in other books. For me, Douglass's book is one of the best out there for its sweep as well as its (pacifist) soul. I just personally find about five percent of it a bit of a reach, which is just another way of saying I think 95 percent is solid. To be so right about something of so much import and controversy is still such a stunning achievement. I was acknowledging that once I come across any source I find shaky in any book's footnotes or endnotes, it slows down the rest of my read as I feel compelled to see it that's just another inconsequential outlier. For what it's worth, I've never found myself falling into that pattern with your books, nor Newman's, nor with Lisa Pease's Lie Too Big. I think maybe it's easier to get just a little swept away here or there when aiming for as massive a sweep as Douglass did.

Thanks for the background, Jim. If I came across as a self-appointed expert, it wasn't my intention. I have too much respect for the actual experts to mistake myself for one.

Bagley's "He had to be witting!" admission is similar to Jane Roman's "keen operational interest" inference, in that both are notable pieces of evidence that fall short of proof. My reading of Newman in this regard allows me to evaluate the same underlying agency docs upon which these expert, insider interpretations are based. Newman's see-for-yourself argument means he's not relying on a trust-me or trust-him argument as it might seem at first blush. Into the Storm's Sam Halpern sections alone left me sufficiently whelmed, and I can't wait to see how Armageddon ties together various threads in all the previous volumes, including the conclusion in Popov that Oswald's defection was a false molehunt. It seems premature to fully evaluate the current volumes until that conclusion's imminent drop. Back to the topic, you're right about the pitfalls of cherry-picking when it comes to politicians. Unless you can cite specific examples of JFK selling out his working-class constituents after March '62, however, it's unacceptable to simply posit a vague certainty that this occurred. I'm told this forum runs on receipts, not unfounded opinions. Anyway, I accept your admission that JFK came to be viewed as a class traitor, which makes it reasonable to view him as favoring the demands of American workers over the demands of the top 10% in the second half of his abbreviated term. Defining oneself primarily as a centrist is intellectually bankrupt in the sense that it's a position based on splitting the difference between aggregated public opinion as corralled by the ever-shifting Overton window. To wade into an ill-advised analogy, a centrist in National Socialist Germany would still have been a National Socialist. An over-reliance on labeling and categorization is no substitute for fearlessly following the best evidence wherever it leads regardless of what others think.

Unspeakable took enough liberties to give me pause in accepting any of its other conclusions at face value without regularly scrutinizing its endnotes. Newman's books, by contrast, are a much smoother read because he's never given me cause to routinely second-guess his sourcing, and he's transparent about his suppositions and interpretations. But as others have noted, Unspeakable is priceless as a compendium of scores of other works. My class-traitor-JFK argument doesn't rely on Douglass's interpretations one iota, but I still felt compelled to credit him for compiling the primary sources upon which my previous post was based. I don't see how you could dismiss as "laughable" Wall St's turn against JFK if you'd been familiar with Chapter 4 of Unspeakable in particular, let alone the '62-steel-crisis fallout in general. It's an inescapable fact, and debunking superficial assertions to the contrary isn't nitpicking over the Judean People's Front -- it's pursuing intellectual honesty regardless of who's arguing what. I've already laid out my aversion to playing footsie with white nationalists like Carlson, in the thread dedicated to that debate. It's a separate issue, and disagreement on one issue doesn't imply disagreement on the other.

Short answer is yes, the way you've constructed those CT arguments, they're also arguments from incredulity. After all, the reverse of those arguments would be just as fallacious: Surely, all those OTHER witnesses can't have been wrong about hearing shots from the TSBD, about observing the limo slow without ever stopping, about there being no large defect in the back of the head, etc. I'm persuaded by the witness reports of a GK shooter and a back-of-head blowout because they correspond with so many of the other types of evidence, from the film and photo evidence to the Harper fragment. And because those witnesses significantly outnumber those who reported otherwise. I agree that simply asking others if they find something plausible does indeed fall short of the incredulity-argument standard. But the mockery embedded in Lance's follow ups to his OP went further than that. If it's not an argument from incredulity to assert that (a straw-man version of) your opponent's position strikes you as "self-evidently absurd," then it's hard to imagine what would qualify.

Not laughable to business elites who felt betrayed as a class by the Kennedys' hardball tactics in April '62 that backed steel companies off a price increase that they'd just broken a promise to avoid so as to avert a strike. Henry Luce's Fortune responded by running an unsigned, inflammatory editorial headlined: "Steel: The Ides of April." Schlesinger quoted JFK in A Thousand Days: "I understand every day how Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously anti-business. It is hard as hell to be friendly with people who keep trying to cut your legs off." JFK spoke before a friendly UAW convention that May: "Last week, after speaking to the Chamber of Commerce... I began to wonder how I got elected. And now I remember." Elites had called his father "the Judas of Wall Street" for using his insider knowledge as the first SEC head to more effectively crack down on profiteering. In the midst of the steel crisis, JFK was quoted in the 4/23/62 NYT: "My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now." Joseph Sr.'s son may not have been roundly tagged as a class traitor in '61, but that perception was widespread the following year among those whose class empowered them to issue such decrees. Let me know if you're still laughing and I can point to additional examples cited in chapter 4 of Douglass's book. You're the one who went with the vague qualifier "some kind."

For all of Lance's harping on "logic," his original post on this thread is the textbook definition of an argument from incredulity (seasoned with a dash of straw men). I can't say whether he was unaware of committing such a blatant Aristotelian fallacy or if it was done deliberately in bad faith. Neither explanation is defensible. As I'm sure we all understand (at least the rest of us), identifying a logical fallacy in an argument means that argument can be wholly dismissed as irrational. I'd say nice try, but that would be dishonest.

Sorry, posted in wrong thread

The immigration arguments that have arisen since my last post have stopped short of echoing the nasty racial component in Carlson's repeated rhetoric on this issue. So rather than engage with our arguments here, I'll simply note that for whatever reason, they're not representative of Carlson's insidious espousal of the Great Replacement Theory. Unless an immigration opponent on this thread is willing to shoulder Carlson's ethnonationalist appeals, since the only gain I can see in leaving such talking points out of this debate is to effectively whitewash Carlson's stance by association -- by not saying the quiet part out loud as he is wont to do. Carlson conflates opposition to white supremacy with opposition to white people as a whole, a sleight-of-hand designed to obscure its unstated logic that white people are entitled to such privileges. His brand is built around a steady, toxic diet of manufactured appeals to white grievance. To remain silent in the face of such wickedness is to tacitly consent to it, on some level.

There's no problem in acknowledging the reality that immigration helps nations with declining birthrates shore up their labor forces and retirement systems. But that's not what alt-righters like Carlson are doing. Carlson is instead arguing that one political party has all but declared war on white people by conspiring to exacerbate immigration by non-whites in order to secure electoral strongholds. If you think this might be true, then just admit it so we can have an honest debate. “The Democratic party is trying to supplant the current electorate, the voters casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world," he asserts. "That’s what’s happening actually, let’s just say it, that’s true.” It's not enough to note the increase in refugees largely fueled by first- and second-order effects of the climate crisis. These global trends must be reduced to a sinister, partisan, anti-white conspiracy. I have to believe there'd be a greater reflexive aversion to such insidious ethnonationalist demagoguery around here if the JFK assassination research community weren't so disproportionately white, let alone aged and, yes, male.

Tucker Carlson has been one of the most effective mainstreamers of the dangerous so-called replacement theory. If you need to look up what replacement theory is, then your opinion has been ill-informed up to this point on the merits of associating with such a person. If you already understood how replacement-theory arguments amount to stochastic terrorism against immigrants, Jews and people of color, feeding into massacres at the Tree of Life Synagogue and the Buffalo Walmart, then I doubt you're so quick to credit a white nationalist for putting on an occasional pretense of plausible deniability about it. EDIT TO ADD: The fact that no one on any rival corporate-media networks has fingered enemies within JFK's own government like Carlson just did only further underscores the depths of their own laziness, naivete and cowardice.

Just ordered the hardcover right before coming here to learn of this Last Second section -- now that's a dialectic I wanna see!

I was speaking more to Robert's possible suspicions of Marina than the actual reality, per se -- but that said, it would still seem ill-advised to so doubtlessly dismiss such a scenario. Especially given CIA records describing a Soviet program to wed would-be sleeper agents to foreign defectors, whom their wives had a habit of divorcing after accompanying their husbands back to their home countries. Given the intense amount of surveillance to which defectors like Oswald were subjected, it's hard to imagine that Marina wasn't at the very least debriefed by Soviet intelligence -- let alone likely having also been recruited into keeping tabs on him. Combine that general prospect with Marina's October 1960 holiday visitation to the same Leningrad apartment building where U.S. defector Robert Webster was living, and one doesn't have to be an acolyte of Jim-Garrison-style propinquity to have the perpetual, proverbial raised eyebrow in this matter. If Marina meeting Lee wasn't a coincidence, then what could she possibly have to gain by admitting as much once he became Kennedy's accused assassin? There would seem to be only downsides there all around, especially in fueling reckless speculation over Soviet involvement in such a plot. I just don't see how she can be cited as a reliable witness, given her contradictory, coached and coerced testimony. Lee's fondness for Kennedy is of course a matter of record, which doesn't need to rely on Marina for substantiation. (It's an honor to be quoted in a post by a luminary such as yourself, Mr. Lifton.)

Among those men arrested in Dealey Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy were two occupants of the Dal-Tex Building apprehended in apparently quick succession, by different law enforcement agencies... and for the exact same allegation. The first, and most notorious of the two, is con artist and mob associate Eugene Brading, 48 – going by his new drivers-license-assisted alias of Jim Braden when queried by his arresting Dallas County Sheriff’s officers, although sticking with his original name with his probation officer a couple hours earlier. Brading (henceforth referred to as Braden to align with the new name he continued using in his HSCA closed-session testimony 15 years later) was reported to police by a 69-year-old Dal-Tex elevator operator named William Sharper. According to that declassified testimony, an alarmed Sharper raced from the building where he worked with Braden on his tail, so as to confront a group of nearby County Sheriff’s deputies sometime in the first 30 minutes of the shooting. Sharper alerted police to Braden having been trespassing upstairs in the building. Braden claimed he’d been just walking by after the shooting and wanted to make a call. However, Roger Carroll, the probation officer to whom he reported while visiting Dallas those couple days, later refused to corroborate his alibi during the shooting. When asked by police for ID, Braden produced a credit card affiliated with an oil company instead of his license, and he was promptly escorted the block away to the Sheriff’s office for further questioning. It wasn't until five years later, after the assassination of the JFK’s brother, that journalist Peter Noyes discovered that this oilman Jim Braden (whom even the Warren Commission acknowledged as having been arrested in Dealey Plaza) was the alias of the notorious Brading – and that his release from the County mere hours after the shooting was mistakenly based on Braden apparently having no criminal record. Police appeared to have been unaware that he was the same Gene Brading run out of town by DPD’s Bill Decker ten years earlier on a well-publicized vagrancy charge, and he enjoyed a courtesy Secret Service ride back to his suite at the Cabana Motor Hotel just on the other side of the Stemmons Freeway. Again, this is the same Braden with a rap sheet including over 30 entries, with such notable offenses as embezzlement, receiving stolen property, mail fraud, car theft and conspiracy. His default racket in those days was seducing and defrauding rich widows, along with fellow swindler Victor Periera. But as Noyes documents in his Legacy of Doubt book, Braden was also linked with infamous mob hitman James “Jimmie the Weasel” Fratiano in a 1956 report to the Greater Miami Crime Commission from LAPD Chief of Intelligence Capt. James Hamilton. As other researchers such as Walt Brown have similarly argued, Braden’s selective use of his new alias on Nov. 22 meant none of this criminal history was reportedly discovered by his arresting officers. Nor was Sharper ever apparently aware of this shady background of the man whom he simply found to be behaving suspiciously in a building overlooking the doomed motorcade route. This much of the event has been generally understood for decades within the research community. Why, then, has William Sharper himself (misspelled as "Sharp" by arresting officer Jim Leavelle) also been widely identified as a suspect in the assassination for much the same period of time? Namely because he, too, was detained by police, allegedly for having been upstairs in the Dal-Tex building (again, where he worked) “without a good excuse,” according to Leavelle’s subsequent write-up. There’s no doubt about it – the matching addresses between William Sharper’s second-hand FBI statement two months later and Leavelle’s own report confirm that this is the same Sharper – his Detonte St. residence is in Dallas’s historically Black Dolphin Heights neighborhood, on the other side of the tracks just a mile past the Cotton Bowl Stadium. In addition to arresting a worker for working in his own building – and under the same allegation that this upstanding worker had just levied against an actual trespassing, unidentified criminal, no less – Leavelle also misidentified Sharper as white when Braden confirms he’s Black in both his same-day affidavit and much-later HSCA testimony. Further corroborating Sharper’s African-American identity is his 11/27/84 Morning News mortuary notice, which notes his career as a Pullman Porter, an elevator-operator-adjacent service trade limited to Black men. All that we can surmise with a high degree of certainty based on a careful synthesis of these primary source documents is that shortly after Sharper turned Braden into Dallas County for trespassing in Sharper’s workplace, the city DPD separately arrested Sharper for the same allegation. It's difficult to construe this sequence of events as anything other than retaliatory in nature. William Sharper was by all credible accounts a model citizen, a Black family man making his way in the Jim Crow South, a service worker whose bravery in alerting a Klan-infested police force to his suspicions of a well-dressed white man has been obfuscated by his continued, knee-jerk designation across some segments of the research community as a suspect in the assassination. Sharper deserves to have his good name cleared, once and for all, as he was clearly punished after simply trying to do the right thing in an unimaginably fraught situation. Such an acknowledgement (along with accusers' apologies to any possible descendants of his out there) should also be coupled with some wider self-reflection – when the most routine of cross checks of Leavelle’s arrest statement with Warren de Brueys’s FBI’s reports of Sharper’s altercation with Braden reveals fundamental contradictions that point toward a far more compelling underlying story: the scapegoating of a witness from a greatly marginalized group – whether through malice, miscommunication, or negligence – by rather nonsensically flipping his allegations back in on him. These illuminating discrepancies, combined with the identical addresses between Leavelle's Sharp and de Brueys's Sharper, should have irrefutably removed him from the bandied-about suspect column decades ago. The fact that it hasn’t is an indication that standards within some prominent elements of the research community have fallen short of those that we should rightly expect of law enforcement and media officials. Braden’s more recently released HSCA testimony only reinforces the contradictions between de Brueys’s and Leavelle’s respective accounts and further impugns the reliability of at least one of these two distinctly untrustworthy lawmen. There’s no way around it. This has been a defamatory breakdown of basic due diligence by some well-reputed researchers of whom we should expect better. Of course mistakes will always be made, but the fact that they can go uncorrected for decades does suggest, though, that our community might sometimes tend toward sloppy source-swapping in lieu of serious peer review. If this example is to be taken as any indication, at least. Either way regardless, it raises the legitimate question that if many people could propagate such an avoidable error for so long, then what other givens in this case are we unwittingly taking on faith through a reflexive trust where there should be healthy skepticism? (To be fair, both Alan Ford and Steve Thomas did pick up on and note these discrepancies in posts to the Assassination and Education forums one and six years ago, respectively. As did Linda Giovanna Zambanini in a FB group around the same time. Doubtless there have been others as well – this is the very definition of low-hanging fruit as far as research goes.) Nonetheless, however, the confusion persists with people for whom it shouldn't. When I attended Northwestern’s Medill j-school in the mid-’90s, the term “Medill F” referred to the automatic failing grade any student would receive in any journalism class if a single factual error, however trivial, was detected in any assignments we submitted. Such unforgiving standards definitely encourage the routinization of reporting best practices which include due diligence – and I would humbly suggest that it’s a standard more of us could afford to set for ourselves. We simply can’t correct our inevitable errors if we’re unwilling to independently scrutinize each other’s work more fully in much the same the way that experts angle to make names for themselves across most academic fields. After all, this ain’t exactly the bridge tournament scores-of-the-week roundup. We are accusing actual real people of facilitating the murder of a president here. Here's one courageous witness, at least, who deserved better from some of us.