David Kaiser: The Road to Dallas

[Pat Speer]

Having been made familiar with the focus of David Kaiser's book The Road to Dallas, I skipped to the chapter on Three Days in November, to see how Kaiser handles information regarding the actual shooting. I was disappointed. It seems to me that Kaiser was well aware that his writing a pro-conspiracy book could hurt his reputation, and knew that his saying anyone but Oswald pulled the trigger would get him labeled a "kook" by men like McAdams and Bugliosi, and so decided to either PRETEND the evidence suggests Oswald's sole guilt in the actual shooting, or ignore everything that might make him have doubts.

Chapter 16 starts out badly, with Kaiser telling his readers "Almost half a century later, no one can add very much about what happened on November 22, 1963." I sat next to Kaiser at a Lancer dinner in 2005. We talked. I told him about my research. He said he had to leave before my presentation. I suggested he check it out online. He either never looked at my online presentations, or chose to dismiss them, neither of which reflects well on his dedication to the truth, in my mind. But that's just pride. I can't reject Kaiser's work just because he ignores mine.

But it's not just mine. A few paragraphs later, when describing Oswald's movements on 11-22, he writes that Oswald carried a "two-foot long package" that "evidently contained his rifle". Evidently? I fail to see why this is so evident, and am concerned that Kaiser fails to tell his readers that the rifle was three-feet long. He then describes Oswald's movements in the TSBD, and writes "One or two witnesses waiting for the President observed him standing near the window before the Presidential motorcade came down Houston Street" (and by window, he means the sniper's nest window). Oh, really? Which one or two? Has Howard Brennan split in half and suddenly become so credible we can cite his statements without acknowledging he refused to ID Oswald when given a chance?

Kaiser then goes on to discuss Kennedy's wounds, and states that the HSCA "appointed a panel of independent experts to use all available photographic evidence to find out if the back and neck wounds in President Kennedy and the back, wrist, and thigh wounds in Governor Connally were in fact lined up at a critical moment and thus could indeed have been caused by one bullet. At frame 190 of the Zapruder film...they did indeed discover a straight bullet path whose trajectory led back to the corner of the sixth floor window of the TSBD." This makes me scratch my head. The medical panel passed no judgment on the time Kennedy was shot, and seemed to lean to Kennedy's having been hit when he was behind the sign, when he MAY have been leaning as far forward as they believed he would have to have been. The photographic panel felt he'd been hit by frame 207. The trajectory panel, on the other hand, which was basically one man, a Johnny-come-lately to the investigation named Thomas Canning, was told, based in part on an analysis of the blurs in the Z-film, to research frame 190 and see IF Kennedy and Connally were in alignment at that point. Canning was even allowed to move their wounds around to make the trajectory work. Implying that all these experts got together and figured out the exact moment that the actual wound locations were in alignment is not only wrong, but deceptive. I'm curious as to how Kaiser came by this.

A bit later, he makes an even bigger mistake. He actually ignores the challenges to Vincent Guinn's assertion that the Connally wrist fragments came

from the magic bullet by citing a recent study by "Dr.s L.M. Sturdivan and Kenneth Rahn." What? First of all, Sturdivan isn't a doctor, last I checked, and second of all, what about the other studies performed recently, such as the one published in the Journal of Forensic Science, demonstrating that Guinn's testimony was seriously flawed? To use Guinn as support for the "magic bullet" theory, at this late date, without noting all the recent studies indicating he'd been high on his own supply, is, to me, a serious oversight.

On the next page, he pulls another major gaffe, as far as I'm concerned. On the HSCA medical panel's acceptance that the bullet entered near the cowlick on the back of Kennedy's skull, and not near the EOP, as described at autopsy, he writes "They came to this conclusion partly because careful examination of the brain x-rays showed no evidence of a wound in the lower area." First of all, there were no "brain x-rays" per se. It was the brain photographs that convinced them. Second of all, it was not so much that the brain photos convinced them there'd been no wound in the lower area, but that the brain photographs convinced them there'd been no wound in the lower area as described in the autopsy report. They described the lower area as “virtually intact…It certainly does not demonstrate the degree of laceration, fragmentation, or contusion (as appears subsequently on the superior aspect of the brain) that would be expected in this location if the bullet wound of entrance were as described in the autopsy report.” While this may sound like nit-picking I believe this is important, in that it demonstrates the panel was aware of some damage, and that this damage may very well have been caused by something other than a high-speed military bullet tearing through Kennedy's skull.

In any event, Kaiser compounds this error by noting, just afterwards, that "Dr. Humes, one of the original autopsy surgeons, appeared before the HSCA and agreed that his team had misidentified the location of the wound in the original report" and leaving it at that. To me, this is just irresponsible. One hour's research would have shown him that Humes later denied ever agreeing to such a thing, that the other two doctors never changed their minds about the wound location, that the HSCA's counsel Gary Cornwell admitted pressuring Humes to change his mind, and had threatened to treat him as a hostile witness if he did not testify that he'd changed his mind, etc. Citing Humes' testimony as if it should be taken at face value is just bad bad history.

If one were to de-construct Kaiser's book, one might conclude that Kaiser thinks of himself as a professional historian, an "expert," and that, as such, it is in his interest to promote the views and conclusions of other experts. While this is dime-store psychology at a discount, it is as good an explanation for Kaiser's near-blind acceptance of the work done by HSCA "experts" as any. But I'm not ready to do that. I'm hoping he just made a mistake, and failed to adequately question the work of the HSCA's experts. If so, might I suggest he do some catching up? My work is online and for free.

Edited April 2, 2008 by Pat Speer

[William Kelly]

David Kaiser's book is important for two reasons.

Academically, it makes a statement that it's okay to believe and promote such a conspiracy theory without losing tenure, and more radically, by viewing Oswald as the lone assassin, yet a rational agent of others, suddenly brings the psycho lone-nut contingent into the player's ballbark, if you know what I mean.

BK

[John Simkin]

I am so far two-thirds of the way through “The Road to Dallas”. I do not agree completely with his analysis but it is so important that such a well-respected historian has tackled this subject and shown by looking at released documents that JFK’s death was part of a conspiracy. I have not yet finished the book and I will eventually have a lot of questions for David but initially I have one question that I hope he will answer:

“What was the most important evidence you found while researching your book that suggested that Oswald did not act alone?”

[John Simkin]

Steve Weinberg's review in the Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20...20/case_closed/

As a professional historian with about 40 years' experience, David Kaiser is proud of his ability to locate and interpret evidence. That experience is a major reason Harvard University Press decided to enter the John F. Kennedy assassination book merry-go-round, now in its 45th year of operation, with Kaiser as its guy.

As an investigative journalist with about 40 years' experience, I have read a couple of dozen books purporting to solve the JFK assassination with curiosity. Skepticism, too. I understand the nature of evidence - I wrote a book used in newsrooms and classrooms about it - and because of that understanding, I doubt any author can solve all the mysteries surrounding the events of Nov. 22, 1963.

Kaiser and Harvard make some large claims. The book's publicity release asserts that "the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an appalling and grisly conspiracy." Kaiser's phrasing in the book itself is less glitzy, but also suggests similar certainty.

"Hundreds of books on the Kennedy assassination have appeared," writes Kaiser, who teaches at the Naval War College and has published a previous book with Harvard about the Vietnam War, "but this is the first one written by a professional historian who has researched the available archives. Partly because of the evidentiary excesses or deficiencies of so many other authors, I have written this book not only to show what happened but to make clear how we know it."

Kaiser explains how Kennedy assassination research got off "to an unfortunate start. Much of this early work became an exercise in trying to show that [Lee Harvey] Oswald, who was indeed guilty, did not commit the crime. On the other hand, most of those who believed that Oswald was the assassin . . . have argued vehemently, in the face of a great deal of contrary evidence, that he acted without any help or encouragement from anyone."

Kaiser says the "truth," his word, is something else. Of all his explanations, perhaps the most succinct shows up on page 378: Oswald, just 24 years old, "shot and killed President Kennedy at the behest of organized crime, and specifically of Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, John Martino, and possibly Sam Giancana."

But those men are only the most prominent of Kaiser's players with reasons to want the president reined in. Kaiser's scenario "involves presidential intimates, down-and-out mercenaries dreaming of glory, mobsters and their show-business paramours, hot-headed Cuban exiles, duplicitous CIA agents, FBI bugs in Chicago restaurants, a mysterious white Russian whose vast circle of friends included Jacqueline Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and George H. W. Bush, American surveillance of embassies in a foreign capital, extreme right-wing businessmen and activists, the moribund and persecuted Communist Party of the United States, and a dogged FBI agent who never quite caught up to Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks before the assassination."

Kaiser lays out his case logically, unlike many other assassination authors. But, as many authors have done in the past, he has fallen in love with portions of his research, and love can blind - or at least cause distortion.

The starkest example is Kaiser's use of testimony from Silvia Odio, a woman sometimes ignored, sometimes barely mentioned, and sometimes featured prominently in other assassination books. Kaiser is so enamored of Odio's importance that he opens his book with her.

During late September or early October 1963 (the precise date matters, but neither Odio nor Kaiser can pin it down, a warning sign that Kaiser deemphasizes), Odio was packing up her Dallas apartment for a move. She was a young divorced Cuban woman with four children. Odio's parents were in a Cuban prison because of their activity against Fidel Castro; she belonged to a group hoping to overthrow Castro with assistance from the US government.

Three men paid her a visit. Two of them, calling themselves "Leopoldo" and "Angelo," claimed to be Cubans, but Odio thought them Mexican. The third man, introduced to Odio as "Leon," seemed American. After the assassination less than two months later, Odio thought Leon was perhaps actually Oswald.

The men asked Odio to identify potential Dallas-area donors to the anti-Castro cause. A day or two later, according to Odio's memory, Leopoldo called her. He allegedly said Leon might try to enter Cuba to assassinate Castro, adding that Leon had commented that anti-Castro Cubans should have shot Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs incursion.

Kaiser believes what he calls the Odio incident "links Oswald and his crime to an enormous network of mobsters, anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing political activists. Together with other new evidence, it allows us to name several of the key players in the conspiracy."

I can't discount the possibility that Kaiser is correct. But, given the well-documented untrustworthiness of eyewitness identification, Odio's changing accounts over the years, the lack of certainty that Kaiser is correct when he surmises that Leopoldo and Angelo were actually Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard, and the apparent leap Kaiser is making even if the Hall and Howard identities are authentic, I can't endorse the overweening significance he ascribes to the Odio incident. In the end, using it as the foundation for calling "The Road to Dallas" the truest book about the case is unpersuasive.

Still, Kaiser and Harvard have produced a worthy book. I would recommend it to anybody as one of many interesting ways to learn about the JFK assassination. Beyond that, I cannot go.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Kaiser's book seems to be drawing much more media attention than Jefferson Morley's much more focussed and tightly argued book Our Man In Mexico.

The two books were realeased at almost the same time. While it is noteworthy that Kaiser's Pro-Conspspiracy book was realeased by a top university press, it is equally significant that Morley's more CIA-centric book was written by a former editor of the Washington Post. Both of these criteria could be seen as major bridges over the moats laboriously dug by reviewers typing the words Conspiracy Theory as if the phrase was immaculately conceived a proper noun and its authors and readers thusly lumped as in a phylum diagnosed on board the H.M.S. Beagle.

Thusly lumped.

Well one bridge over this media-minded moat it being used much more than the other.

[Michael Hogan]

Steve Weinberg's review in the Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20...20/case_closed/

The reviewer, Steve Weinberg is an accomplished author in his own right. His latest book, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller has just been released.

From Publisher's Weekly:

Investigative journalist Weinberg (Armand Hammer: The Untold Story) briskly recounts the story of the rise of the Standard Oil monopoly in the late 19th century and muckraking reporter Ida Tarbell's role in bringing it down. The book is a study in opposites: John D. Rockefeller used his enormous wealth to establish the staid, stable family life he had lacked as a youngster. Tarbell—raised in bourgeois stability, intellectually ravenous and interested in the women's movement from an early age —resisted women's traditional domestic role. Wishing to help address society's problems, Tarbell was lured into magazine writing, where she developed what Weinberg calls her trademark tone of controlled outrage. In her articles on Standard, published just after the turn of the 20th century in McClure's and then in book form, she amassed evidence that Rockefeller engaged in unfair competition and argued forcefully that all Americans should be concerned with business ethics. Her reporting helped create the modern genre of investigative journalism, and the author's brief references to Wal-Mart and contemporary journalism suggest that he hopes this engaging account—a likely pick for journalism classes—can help inspire more reporters to follow in Tarbell's footsteps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Trust-Battle-...6262&sr=1-1

[William Kelly]

Steve Weinberg's review in the Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/20...20/case_closed/

The reviewer, Steve Weinberg is an accomplished author in his own right. His latest book, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller has just been released.

From Publisher's Weekly:

Investigative journalist Weinberg (Armand Hammer: The Untold Story) briskly recounts the story of the rise of the Standard Oil monopoly in the late 19th century and muckraking reporter Ida Tarbell's role in bringing it down. The book is a study in opposites: John D. Rockefeller used his enormous wealth to establish the staid, stable family life he had lacked as a youngster. Tarbell—raised in bourgeois stability, intellectually ravenous and interested in the women's movement from an early age —resisted women's traditional domestic role. Wishing to help address society's problems, Tarbell was lured into magazine writing, where she developed what Weinberg calls her trademark tone of controlled outrage. In her articles on Standard, published just after the turn of the 20th century in McClure's and then in book form, she amassed evidence that Rockefeller engaged in unfair competition and argued forcefully that all Americans should be concerned with business ethics. Her reporting helped create the modern genre of investigative journalism, and the author's brief references to Wal-Mart and contemporary journalism suggest that he hopes this engaging account—a likely pick for journalism classes—can help inspire more reporters to follow in Tarbell's footsteps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Trust-Battle-...6262&sr=1-1

Please note that Weinberg's "Taking on the Trust - The Epic Battle..." is published by Norton.

Aren't these the same Norton guys favored by Zelikow and the Miller Center Munchkins who put out the first edition of the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission?

For someone who has written a book about the techniques of investigative reporters, I wonder how Weinberg can explain the failure of the 4th Estate to uncover the truth about the JFK assassination?

From the reviews so far, it doesn't seem like David Kaiser will delve very deeply, or at all, into Oswald's associations with PJM, Snyder, ELK, and the Harvard Russian Research Center, or Harvard's role in the Kennedy administration and the assassination, being the publisher.

It's now academically okay to echo G. Robert Blakey and his cohorts and blame the assassination on a handfull of mobsters and renegade spooks.

If Norton's going to publish Weinberg and Harvard David Kaiser, whose going to publish the truth?

BK

[David Kaiser]

I am so far two-thirds of the way through “The Road to Dallas”. I do not agree completely with his analysis but it is so important that such a well-respected historian has tackled this subject and shown by looking at released documents that JFK’s death was part of a conspiracy. I have not yet finished the book and I will eventually have a lot of questions for David but initially I have one question that I hope he will answer:

“What was the most important evidence you found while researching your book that suggested that Oswald did not act alone?”

This was the second book that I have written about a famous crime--the first dealt with the case of Sacco and Vanzetti (it had been begun by a friend of mine, William Young, but he passed it on to me when he died in 1980.) I learned a great deal about this kind of enterprise doing that book and I learned a lot more this time. I am also seeing some things more clearly as a result of the reaction to The Road to Dallas.

I must say, John, that your question, in my opinion, exemplifies what has been wrong with the vast majority of JFK assassination research, on all sides of the question. Everyone is looking for one smoking gun or one fact about Oswald's character or one piece of physical evidence that will prove, or disprove, a conspiracy. But that is not what history is about. "The historian's task," wrote Henry Adams, one of the greatest, "is to state facts in their sequence." The King of Hearts told the White Rabbit the same thing (see frontispiece, The Road to Dallas.) That is what I have tried to do.

No single piece of evidence is critical in itself. The problem is to place them within a coherent story, and that is what so many fail to do. My book has delineated in great (and totally unprecedented) detail the network of mobsters, American mercenaries, Cuban exiles, American right-wingers and (at times) CIA operatives that was operating around the country in the early 1960s. It shows the motives of the mobsters, in particular, for wanting to kill JFK. It shows they discussed it. It shows how one of them had prior knowledge. It shows that Oswald had become connected to that network. It shows that Ruby was connected to it as well. It shows that that network mounted a disinformation campaign on the afternoon of November 22 to link Oswald to Fidel. It shows how leading mobsters reacted in 1975 when key elements of the story began to leak out. It shows that certain people admitted involvement. And so on. All this is cumulative and mutually re-enforcing.

After I wrote Postmorem about Sacco and Vanzetti, a statistician I know became interested in the subject. He uses something called Bayesian analysis, which is technique for estimating a combined probability of a certain event, based upon the probabilities of certain related events. I did not try to use this technique formally writing The Road to Dallas but I constantly use it informally. Thus, for instance, if some one claims to have seen Oswald or Ruby at a particular time and place, the critical issue is often not so much the reliability of that particular individual as it is whether other evidence (especially evidence they could not possibly have known about) supports the idea that Oswald or Ruby was there.

The more popular way to deal with the case, sadly, is to postulate either that there was a massive conspiracy--in which case every piece of evidence tending to show a conspiracy must be true--or to postulate that Oswald and Ruby must have been a lone assassin, in which case every suspicious piece of evidence must be dismissed. That may be emotionally simpler but it won't lead to the truth.

I hope this post, and the book, will help some people to think about the case in a new way.

best, David Kaiser

[Pat Speer]

I am so far two-thirds of the way through “The Road to Dallas”. I do not agree completely with his analysis but it is so important that such a well-respected historian has tackled this subject and shown by looking at released documents that JFK’s death was part of a conspiracy. I have not yet finished the book and I will eventually have a lot of questions for David but initially I have one question that I hope he will answer:

“What was the most important evidence you found while researching your book that suggested that Oswald did not act alone?”

This was the second book that I have written about a famous crime--the first dealt with the case of Sacco and Vanzetti (it had been begun by a friend of mine, William Young, but he passed it on to me when he died in 1980.) I learned a great deal about this kind of enterprise doing that book and I learned a lot more this time. I am also seeing some things more clearly as a result of the reaction to The Road to Dallas.

I must say, John, that your question, in my opinion, exemplifies what has been wrong with the vast majority of JFK assassination research, on all sides of the question. Everyone is looking for one smoking gun or one fact about Oswald's character or one piece of physical evidence that will prove, or disprove, a conspiracy. But that is not what history is about. "The historian's task," wrote Henry Adams, one of the greatest, "is to state facts in their sequence." The King of Hearts told the White Rabbit the same thing (see frontispiece, The Road to Dallas.) That is what I have tried to do.

No single piece of evidence is critical in itself. The problem is to place them within a coherent story, and that is what so many fail to do. My book has delineated in great (and totally unprecedented) detail the network of mobsters, American mercenaries, Cuban exiles, American right-wingers and (at times)

ives that was operating around the country in the early 1960s. It shows the motives of the mobsters, in particular, for wanting to kill JFK. It shows they discussed it. It shows how one of them had prior knowledge. It shows that Oswald had become connected to that network. It shows that Ruby was connected to it as well. It shows that that network mounted a disinformation campaign on the afternoon of November 22 to link Oswald to Fidel. It shows how leading mobsters reacted in 1975 when key elements of the story began to leak out. It shows that certain people admitted involvement. And so on. All this is cumulative and mutually re-enforcing.

After I wrote Postmorem about Sacco and Vanzetti, a statistician I know became interested in the subject. He uses something called Bayesian analysis, which is technique for estimating a combined probability of a certain event, based upon the probabilities of certain related events. I did not try to use this technique formally writing The Road to Dallas but I constantly use it informally. Thus, for instance, if some one claims to have seen Oswald or Ruby at a particular time and place, the critical issue is often not so much the reliability of that particular individual as it is whether other evidence (especially evidence they could not possibly have known about) supports the idea that Oswald or Ruby was there.

The more popular way to deal with the case, sadly, is to postulate either that there was a massive conspiracy--in which case every piece of evidence tending to show a conspiracy must be true--or to postulate that Oswald and Ruby must have been a lone assassin, in which case every suspicious piece of evidence must be dismissed. That may be emotionally simpler but it won't lead to the truth.

I hope this post, and the book, will help some people to think about the case in a new way.

best, David Kaiser

A good point, David, and one I hope will not be lost on your fellow academics. I've spent a lot of time over the past few years arguing the case with single-assassin theorists. While they'd like to think their defense of the Warren Commission's conclusions is based purely on the evidence, it isn't really so. They fail to see that the Warren Commission's conclusions were based on only part of the evidence, and that its investigation may have went in all sorts of different directions should they have been provided with a bigger picture. When one reads the HSCA-era statements of most everyone involved with the Warren Commission, one can see that virtually all of them felt the post-WC revelations of CIA/mafia ties and assassination attempts changed the playing field, and required a new investigation. In other words, their thoughts were much as you describe. Since, to them, the over-all pattern in 1964 was of a weirdo whipping out a gun, they accepted all the evidence suggesting as much and dismissed the evidence pointing to a larger conspiracy. But, by the mid-70's, that had changed.

From a purely logical standpoint, for Oswald to have acted alone, and for there to have been no conspiracy, a whole series of coincidences must have taken place. (One of our fellow Forum members--I forget just who--calls single-assassin theorists coincidence theorists, and its more than apropos.) To follow just one chain of coincidences...1) that Jack Ruby would be in contact with what? 5 or 6 different mafia or teamster enforcers in the months leading up to the assassination; 2) that Lee Harvey Oswald would have traveled to Mexico, and have been impersonated by the CIA while in Mexico; 3) that he would meet with a woman in Mexico, who just so happened to have been the mistress of the Cuban Ambassador to the UN; 4) that this Cuban ambassador to the UN was involved in backdoor negotiations to normalize relations between the US and Cuba; 5) that E. Howard Hunt was involved in the Domestic Operations Division of the CIA, whose job in 1964 just so happened to include spying on this Cuban ambassador, and that E. Howard Hunt would later admit some sort of involvement in the assassination; 6) that E. Howard Hunt would have an extremely close relationship with Manuel Artime, who just so happened to be the anti-Castro leader who would be left out to dry should Kennedy normalize relations with Castro; 7) the CIA was concurrently trying to assassinate Castro, using a man named Cubela--when Cubela asked for an assassination weapon with a silencer, the CIA proposed he get his silencer from Artime, thereby confirming that Artime's organization had an assassination capability. This kind of stuff goes on and on. One can take the coincidences in a different direction entirely, should one wish. Even though there's weak links in the chain, the over-all picture painted by the evidence is the picture of a conspiracy.

Edited April 22, 2008 by Pat Speer

[John Simkin]

I am so far two-thirds of the way through “The Road to Dallas”. I do not agree completely with his analysis but it is so important that such a well-respected historian has tackled this subject and shown by looking at released documents that JFK’s death was part of a conspiracy. I have not yet finished the book and I will eventually have a lot of questions for David but initially I have one question that I hope he will answer:

“What was the most important evidence you found while researching your book that suggested that Oswald did not act alone?”

This was the second book that I have written about a famous crime--the first dealt with the case of Sacco and Vanzetti (it had been begun by a friend of mine, William Young, but he passed it on to me when he died in 1980.) I learned a great deal about this kind of enterprise doing that book and I learned a lot more this time. I am also seeing some things more clearly as a result of the reaction to The Road to Dallas.

I must say, John, that your question, in my opinion, exemplifies what has been wrong with the vast majority of JFK assassination research, on all sides of the question. Everyone is looking for one smoking gun or one fact about Oswald's character or one piece of physical evidence that will prove, or disprove, a conspiracy. But that is not what history is about. "The historian's task," wrote Henry Adams, one of the greatest, "is to state facts in their sequence." The King of Hearts told the White Rabbit the same thing (see frontispiece, The Road to Dallas.) That is what I have tried to do.

Of course, I did not ask you if you found “one smoking gun”. Instead I asked you “What was the most important evidence you found while researching your book that suggested that Oswald did not act alone?” The reason I asked that was that while reading your book I failed to find any new evidence that did not appear in Larry Hancock’s Someone Would Have Talked? (A book that strangely you did nor refer to in your book).

You claim on page 7 that: “Hundreds of books on the Kennedy assassination have appeared, but this is the first one written by a professional historian who has researched the available archives”. What about Gerald McKnight’s Breach of Trust (2005), John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA (1995) and Michael Kurtz’s The Kennedy Assassination From a Historian's Perspective (1982), Conflict and Consensus in the JFK Assassination Debates (2003) and The JFK Assassination Debates (2006)? Interestingly, these books are not referred to in the book.

Even so, there is nothing to stop a non-professional historian using the skills of the historians. For example, no one could be more careful about the way he uses documentary evidence than Larry Hancock.

The problem with the documents that have been released is that they point in different directions. For a writer to come up with a conclusion to who killed JFK he/she has to select some documents as important while ignoring those documents that suggest another theory. For example, on pages 414-416 you write:

The murder of John F Kennedy emerged from two overlapping zones of illegality: American organized crime, which was defending itself against Robert Kennedy's relentless attack, and the U.S government-sponsored or tolerated anti-Castro movement. Illegality and secrecy go together, but enough information emerged both before and after the assassination to trace the essence of the organized crime conspiracy.

The most direct evidence points to Santo Trafficante, because of his connections to John Martino, who had advance knowledge of the plot, and to Loran Hall, who was evidently with Oswald at Silvia Odio's house and who spoke of protecting Trafficante in 1976-77. Trafficante's own lawyer, Frank Ragano, confirmed his boss's involvement and described giving encouragement from Jimmy Hoffa to both Trafficante and Carlos Marcello in the spring of 1963. Marcello bragged about his role at least twice. He was even more threatened by the government than Trafficante was, with deportation hanging over his head. Oswald and his family had lifelong connections with Marcello's mob, including David Ferrie, Oswald's Uncle Dutz Murret, and Guy Banister, who was working for Marcello by the summer of 1963.

Sam Giancana had also been fighting tremendous pressure from the government for three years and had spoken frequently about it. Jack Ruby's calls to Chicago mob figures such as Barney Baker and Irwin Weiner in the months before the assassination suggest that Giancana might have been involved in the conspiracy as well, as do the disinformation activities of his well-connected henchman, Richard Cain. Ruby had connections to all three of the most likely mob conspirators. He had visited Trafficante in jail in Cuba in 1959 and was still in touch with Trafficante's old friend Lewis McWillie. He had grown up with Giancana's Chicago mob and still kept up with some of its members. And he now operated strip clubs in Dallas, which appears to have been a subsidiary branch of Marcello's New Orleans empire. All three of these hoodlums knew that Jimmy Hoffa's endorsement of their enterprise could prove useful. And John Roselli, although he cannot be linked directly to the assassination itself, worked closely with Giancana and Trafficante in the anti-Castro plots, and he indicated many times to Edward Morgan and Jack Anderson that there was more to the assassination of President Kennedy than Lee Harvey Oswald. He evidently was murdered in 1976 because he knew too much.

Where did these men find the audacity to kill a president of the United States? G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings speculated convincingly in the 1970s that John Kennedy, because he accepted women as favors through Frank Sinatra (and perhaps in other contexts as well), had lost the immunity from retaliation that truly incorruptible public officials generally enjoyed. By enlisting these very mob leaders to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1960, the CIA had inevitably "weakened any inhibition about killing a head of government In addition, Robert Kennedy's campaign against the mob-fought with every available weapon, and without many of the legal tools that later became available fell outside traditional rules as well. The attorney general indicted suspected mobsters for any offense, no matter how trivial. When he discovered in 1962 that he could not indict Giancana because of his CIA connection, he pushed the FBI surveillance of him even harder. All these men knew that Hoffa's comment about the attorney general - that Robert Kennedy would not rest until Hoffa was behind bars was true for them as well. These were desperate times that called for desperate measures.

That many anti-Castro Cubans, including one that had contact with Oswald, had very strong negative feelings about President Kennedy is also clear, but only a few pieces of evidence implicate any of them in the assassination itself. The first is the Rose Cheramie story of the two men who drove her from Miami to Louisiana on their way to Dallas to take part in the assassination, but there is no proof that they Were Cuban. The second is Tony Cuesta's reported identification of Sandalio Herminio Diaz and Eladio del Valle as having been present in Dallas on November 22, but that cannot be confirmed. And the last is the tip the Dallas sheriff received after the assassination about meetings between Cubans and Oswald on Harlandale Avenue, a key lead that was never pursued.

Lee Harvey Oswald did kill President Kennedy all by himself. If someone fired a shot from the grassy knoll, he missed. The mob and the anti-Castro Cubans were part of a much broader nationwide network of right-wing activists, anti-Communists operating privately or within congressional committees, conservative businessmen like William Pawley and H. L. Hunt, and a few paramilitaries like the Minutemen. Many if not all of these men regarded the Kennedys as a mortal threat to America as they understood it. Pawley was close to John Martino, and Hunt reportedly subsidized Martino's book tour and was in touch with him through his security chief, former FBI agent Paul Rothermel. But the only evidence that suggests such elements were directly involved in the assassination is Loran Hall's unconfirmed story of being offered $100,000 to kill Kennedy in Dallas in the summer of 1963.

Nothing suggests that the CIA was involved in the assassination.

This analysis is very close to that of G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings and is largely based on the HSCA investigation. However, a study of these documents can result to different conclusions. For example, Gaeton Fonzi, the HSCA’s investigator, took the view that the CIA was indeed involved in the assassination. Fonzi’s conclusions have been given credence by the revelation that George Joannides, DRE’s principal case officer in 1963, was the CIA’s liaison with the HSCA.

Is it not possible that Joannides and the CIA only released documents that implicated the Mafia but withheld those that showed that the agency was closely associated with the assassination?

[Tim Gratz]

John wrote:

This analysis is very close to that of G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings and is largely based on the HSCA investigation. However, a study of these documents can result to different conclusions. For example, Gaeton Fonzi, the HSCA’s investigator, took the view that the CIA was indeed involved in the assassination. Fonzi’s conclusions have been given credence by the revelation that George Joannides, DRE’s principal case officer in 1963, was the CIA’s liaison with the HSCA.

Respectfully, as excellent an investigator as he was, Fonzi's conclusions were often mere "leaps" toward a conclusion he wanted to reach. He based a lot of his theory of CIA involvement on the alleged association of Lee Harvey Oswald with a CIA agent he knew as Maurice Bishop. Of course the conventional wisdom is that Bishop was David Atlee Phillips. But whether Bishop was Phillips or another CIA officer is really beside the point. There are really two questions to be considered: (1) Did Veciana actually see Bishop with Oswald in Dallas? and (2) if Veciana did see Oswald with Bishop. what does that mean as it relates to the assassination?

With respect to the first question it must be noted that there were some valid questions re Veciana's story, questions the members of the HSCA felt significant. But even if Veciana did witness the encounter he claimed, what does it mean?

All that can be concluded from the Veciana story is the following:

(1) Oswald clearly did have a relationship with the CIA--and with Bishop.

(The recent disclosures in Kurtz's "The Assassination Debates" would confirm that relationship if Leake told

Kurtz the truth.)

(2) The CIA lied (repeatedly) about its lack of a relationship with Oswald. (And per Leake destroyed documents from NO re that relationship.)

Now how do we get from the "facts" that Oswald was working for the CIA and the CIA lied about that fact to the sensational conclusion that CIA officers helped plan the assassination? IMO there is no necessary nexus there and in fact Veciana's story of an association between Bishop and Oswald that he witnesses exculpates Bishop.

As Lamar Waldron argues (persuasively I think) if Bishop was involved in assassination planning the absolute LAST thing in the world he would permit would be to be seen with Oswald by one of the few persons who could identify him. Thus, the Veciana observation in Dallas exculpates Bishop. This analysis would be true even if one assumes LHO was not the shooter but only the CIA's designated patsy.

The only argument would be that someone in the CIA other than Bishop knew Oswald's relationship with the CIA and employed Oswald as the assassin or patsy. But that is rank speculation.

A far more logical scenario is that someone used LHO as a patsy knowing of his relationship with the CIA and knowing that such relationship would GUARANTEE a cover-up at the highest levels. IMO if the CIA actually had wanted to kill JFK it would have found a patsy with no previous CIA association. Why risk the destruction of the entire Agency by employing a patsy who as Sen Schweiker said "had the fingerprints of intelligence all around him"?

What if Leake or some other CIA official had testified to that relationship years earlier?

Re Joannides, all that suggests is that the CIA needed a reliable person to ensure that the HSCA did not uncover its relationship with Oswald.

John wrote:

Is it not possible that Joannides and the CIA only released documents that implicated the Mafia but withheld those that showed that the agency was closely associated with the assassination?

Again, there is no evidence I suggest to link CIA officers with the assassination. It strains credulity to even contemplate that had any officers of the CIA planned the assassination they would put any such planning in document form and-- in the extremely unlikely event any such documents existed that they would be around in the 1970s. Again, remember that Hunter Leake allegedly told Prof Kurtz that immediately after the assassination Helms ordered documents destroyed that merely showed a CIA relationship with Oswald. Does anyone SERIOUSLY think Helms would destroy those documents but leave in the files for possible discovery years later documents that linked the CIA to the assassination?

Again, I think we can reasonably be confident that:

(a) if CIA officers planned the assassination, the chance that any documents had ever been prepared that showed that would be no more than one in a million. ( If the one in a million chance did exist, the possibility that any such documents still existed on December 1, 1963 is absolutely ZERO.

Edited April 24, 2008 by Tim Gratz

[Pat Speer]

John wrote:

This analysis is very close to that of G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings and is largely based on the HSCA investigation. However, a study of these documents can result to different conclusions. For example, Gaeton Fonzi, the HSCA’s investigator, took the view that the CIA was indeed involved in the assassination. Fonzi’s conclusions have been given credence by the revelation that George Joannides, DRE’s principal case officer in 1963, was the CIA’s liaison with the HSCA.

Respectfully, as excellent an investigator as he was, Fonzi's conclusions were often mere "leaps" toward a conclusion he wanted to reach. He based a lot of his theory of CIA involvement on the alleged association of Lee Harvey Oswald with a CIA agent he knew as Maurice Bishop. Of course the conventional wisdom is that Bishop was David Atlee Phillips. But whether Bishop was Phillips or another CIA officer is really beside the point. There are really two questions to be considered: (1) Did Veciana actually see Bishop with Oswald in Dallas? and (2) if Veciana did see Oswald with Bishop. what does that mean as it relates to the assassination?

With respect to the first question it must be noted that there were some valid questions re Veciana's story, questions the members of the HSCA felt significant. But even if Veciana did witness the encounter he claimed, what does it mean?

All that can be concluded from the Veciana story is the following:

(1) Oswald clearly did have a relationship with the CIA--and with Bishop.

(The recent disclosures in Kurtz's "The Assassination Debates" would confirm that relationship if Leake told

Kurtz the truth.)

(2) The CIA lied (repeatedly) about its lack of a relationship with Oswald. (And per Leake destroyed documents from NO re that relationship.)

Now how do we get from the "facts" that Oswald was working for the CIA and the CIA lied about that fact to the sensational conclusion that CIA officers helped plan the assassination? IMO there is no necessary nexus there and in fact Veciana's story of an association between Bishop and Oswald that he witnesses exculpates Bishop.

As Lamar Waldron argues (persuasively I think) if Bishop was involved in assassination planning the absolute LAST thing in the world he would permit would be to be seen with Oswald by one of the few persons who could identify him. Thus, the Veciana observation in Dallas exculpates Bishop. This analysis would be true even if one assumes LHO was not the shooter but only the CIA's designated patsy.

The only argument would be that someone in the CIA other than Bishop knew Oswald's relationship with the CIA and employed Oswald as the assassin or patsy. But that is rank speculation.

A far more logical scenario is that someone used LHO as a patsy knowing of his relationship with the CIA and knowing that such relationship would GUARANTEE a cover-up at the highest levels. IMO if the CIA actually had wanted to kill JFK it would have found a patsy with no previous CIA association. Why risk the destruction of the entire Agency by employing a patsy who as Sen Schweiker said "had the fingerprints of intelligence all around him"?

What if Leake or some other CIA official had testified to that relationship years earlier?

Re Joannides, all that suggests is that the CIA needed a reliable person to ensure that the HSCA did not uncover its relationship with Oswald.

John wrote:

Is it not possible that Joannides and the CIA only released documents that implicated the Mafia but withheld those that showed that the agency was closely associated with the assassination?

Again, there is no evidence I suggest to link CIA officers with the assassination. It strains credulity to even contemplate that had any officers of the CIA planned the assassination they would put any such planning in document form and-- in the extremely unlikely event any such documents existed that they would be around in the 1970s. Again, remember that Hunter Leake allegedly told Prof Kurtz that immediately after the assassination Helms ordered documents destroyed that merely showed a CIA relationship with Oswald. Does anyone SERIOUSLY think Helms would destroy those documents but leave in the files for possible discovery years later documents that linked the CIA to the assassination?

Again, I think we can reasonably be confident that:

(a) if CIA officers planned the assassination, the chance that any documents had ever been prepared that showed that would be no more than one in a million. ( If the one in a million chance did exist, the possibility that any such documents still existed on December 1, 1963 is absolutely ZERO.

You under-estimate the incompetence of a bureaucracy, and the wide swath of the paper trail. The WC transcript of the executive session in which Oswald's possible role as an FBI informant was discussed was ordered destroyed, and Chief Warren's "bodyguard" Elmer Moore gathered up all the copies, etc... But they overlooked the steno service employee's carbon copy, which Harold Weisberg found in the Archives. Similarly, by discussing with Senator Russell his dissent on the single-bullet theory, and then comparing it to the paper trail, Weisberg was able to uncover that Rankin and Warren had destroyed the transcript of that September proceeding WITHOUT the knowledge of the other commissioners. From such pieces history can be re-written.

Look at the Katzenbach memo, or the 1967 CIA memo on methods to discredit critics in the media. If the bureaucratic arm of cover-up were fool-proof, these never would have seen the light of day.

[Dawn Meredith]

"Why risk the destruction of the entire agency...?" Nice to see TG is back in usual form. That is laughable TG, if this were not so tragic an event for the country.

I concur, (as usual), with Bill Kelly : Who is going to give us the truth? A rhetorical question since there have been many good books on this subject that get as close to the truth as we will likely ever come.

The new bok by Jim Douglas -(which I have on order)- promises to be one such book. (Based on the excellent and thorough review by Jim DiEugenio).

Dawn

[Tim Gratz]

Pat, the point you made is an excellent one but I submit it also proves my point that any officer in the CIA who was participating in a planned assassination of the POTUS would never have committed any details to writing.

It would not surprise me if somewhere there may exist a single document (maybe two) that links Oswald to the CIA for the reasons you suggest and that may very well explain why the CIA brought Joannides in to be the liason (ha!) with the HSCA. But Pat, do you really think that even if CIA officers had planned the assassination anything about tHAT would have been committed to writing?

Dawn, as usual, appears to have missed my entire point. By the very reason that Pat cites, if the CIA was going to do the assassination and frame a patsy the LAST person it would have considered as a patsy was someone whom, if the right document might somehow slip through the cracks (or if some one in the Company "talked") could be linked to the Agency. It is for that reason that I have always believed that if Oswald was, as so many believe and has now been proved (if Leake and Kurtz are both truth-tellers) employed or affiliated with the CIA, then no halfway-intelligent CIA officer would have used HIM as a patsy (and obviously whoever did plan the assassination was more than "halfway-intelligent). On the other hand, Oswald would become the "perfect patsy" for someone not connected to the CIA (or even possibly a "rogue agent") because that person knew that a cover-up would be ASSURED if any Agency-affiliated person was made the patsy.

[John Simkin]

John wrote:

Is it not possible that Joannides and the CIA only released documents that implicated the Mafia but withheld those that showed that the agency was closely associated with the assassination?

Again, there is no evidence I suggest to link CIA officers with the assassination. It strains credulity to even contemplate that had any officers of the CIA planned the assassination they would put any such planning in document form and-- in the extremely unlikely event any such documents existed that they would be around in the 1970s. Again, remember that Hunter Leake allegedly told Prof Kurtz that immediately after the assassination Helms ordered documents destroyed that merely showed a CIA relationship with Oswald. Does anyone SERIOUSLY think Helms would destroy those documents but leave in the files for possible discovery years later documents that linked the CIA to the assassination?

You are quite right to argue that there is no documentary evidence that proves that the CIA was involved in the assassination. Nor do I suspect that any such evidence ever existed. Why would they produce such documents?

At the same time there is no documentary evidence that the Mafia killed JFK. That is what makes Kaiser’s strong support for his theory so strange. This is also why he reacted in the way that he did when I asked him about the “new” evidence for his theory. He has none. He is just relying on the evidence accumulated by the HSCA. As I pointed out, his analysis is very close to that of G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings and is largely based on the HSCA investigation. However, a study of these documents can result to different conclusions. For example, Gaeton Fonzi, the HSCA’s investigator, took the view that the CIA was indeed involved in the assassination.

In an early exchange on the forum, (6th July, 2006) included the following:

John Simkin: What is your basic approach to writing about what I would call “secret history”? How do you decide what sources to believe? How do you manage to get hold of documents that prove that illegal behaviour has taken place?

David Kaiser: The basic rule is that before-the-fact (in this case, pre-November 1963) documents are more important than after-the-fact ones. There's a hierarchy of evidence. People who come forward years later with stories are suspect, and if they said something different at the time, one has to discount them heavily. Meanwhile, one has to read as many documents as possible to understand the context of a particular event. David Kaiser claimed as a historian

John Simkin: It is true that in some areas of history writing, documents are far more important than interviews. However, in some areas, such as writing about the activities of the intelligence services, documents have to be treated with extreme caution. For a start, documents can be destroyed, doctored or withheld. Senior CIA officials have gone on record as saying that details of some actions, for example, illegal ones, do not appear in documents. If they do, code names are used to make it extremely difficult for researchers to discover “who was doing what”.

CIA agents also create documents with false information (disinformation is an important aspect of the work of a CIA agent). There is an interesting passage in Felix I. Rodriguez’s book, Shadow Warrior. He explains how in 1976 he was asked to carry out CIA work in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. This included the organization of using B-26K bombers and helicopters against insurgents in these countries. The problem was that Rodriguez was known to be working for the CIA and if he got caught it would have caused the government political embarrassment. Therefore he was asked by Ted Shackley to make a very public retirement from the CIA. This included being awarded the Intelligence Star for Valor (page 254).

Of course, Rodriguez, only revealed this information after he had been exposed by the Iran-Contra investigations. If certain investigative journalists had not had the courage to write about these matters, historians would not be able to write about the involvement of the CIA in illegal activities.

It seems to me that historians should be more willing to question the official account that appears in government documents. For example, the brave work of Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972) and A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2006). These are books that could not have been written if McCoy had only used official documents.

David Kaiser: There is certainly some truth in what you say. I do not think internal CIA documents say A when not A is the truth very often, but it is obvious that many things are never documented, and any response to any other agency is based upon what is in the documentation, nothing more. (When some one asks, inside the CIA, "what is our conneciton to x?", the answer is, in actual fact, "what is in the files about X?" ) The FBI is a different matter altogether. Data inside the FBI becomes scared as soon as it is written down (or it did.) And they are in the business of collecting data. I have just discovered (actually Newman discovered it) a case in which a senior FBI official created an alternative vision of history but that is VERY rare.

The problem for a responsible historian dealing with the CIA is this: just because various things MIGHT be true must not be taken as a license to believe ANYTHING might be true. I will discuss this point a good deal in the book.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7305

David does not keep to the rules that he set himself in his book, The Road to Dallas. He relies heavily on confessions that have been made some time after the event. For example, the confessions made by people like John Martino, Frank Ragano and Carlos Marcello. He also uses that most dubious of practices of someone being “guilty by association”. So poor old Oswald is likely to be the assassin because his uncle, Dutz Murret, was a member of the Mafia.

However, David then goes on to argue that “Nothing suggests that the CIA was involved in the assassination.” Well, there is plenty of evidence available if you are willing to accept confessions as evidence. For example, the confessions made by David Morales and Carl E. Jenkins. These confessions are just as reliable as those of Mafia figures. It is no surprise that there is not one reference in David Kaiser’s book to either man. Yet I attended the same sessions of the JFK Lancer conference with David when Larry Hancock provided details of these confessions. David therefore knew about this evidence but choose not to use it in his book. It is also enlightening that David did not refer to Larry’s "Someone Would Have Talked" in his book. The great test of the historian is not just what he includes in his book. It is the information that he would prefer his reader not to be aware of.