David Kaiser: The Road to Dallas

[Christopher Hall]

Perhaps the best reason for discounting Hunt's deathbed "confession" is that he involves Antonio Veciana in the plot. He claims Veciana was recruited in to the plot by that villain to all CIA-haters, David Atlee Phillips.

It of course is impossible to believe that Veciana would have told Fonzi about seeing MB with LHO (and at least implying that MB was really DAP) potentially drawing investigative scrutiny on to DAP. If the plot had unraveled because of that disclosure, Veciana potentially faced the possibility of having his internal organs fried in the Texas electric chair. If Veciana was part of the plot, he clearly would not have told his story (true or not I am not sure) to Fonzi. Since he did tell the story, he could not be part of the plot. Since he was not involved but EHH claims he was, EHH is a demonstrable xxxx. I believe EHH is spending eternity in a place that no snowball would last for more than a few seconds, and has probably been rightly assigned to one of the warmer pits.

By the way, in one of the first chapters of "American Spy" EHH brags about committing adultery with another man's wife. Of course that could just be another of his lies.

Tim-

It has been a while since I read The Last Investigation, but I thought that Veciana denied (albeit unconvincingly) that DAP was MB.

Also, his seeing MB with LHO wouldn't necessarily implicate him on a plot to kill the President, unless additional facts re his participation in matters relating to Miami, Chicago or Dallas were adduced.

As for EHH lying compulsively, there is no doubt.

Either he or Veciana was lying.

I just don't reach all of the conclusions that you do, but I may have a predispositon to believing the EHH was in on the plot.

Incidentally, I had a classmate in gradeschool (in Memphis) named Vecianna, and he was a fairly recent refugee from Cuba, along with the rest of his family.

He told me of how his father (a physician) had tricked Castro into letting him come to Miami to treat a relative. I forget how the rest of the family escaped. At least that is how I think the story went.

Chris

[Tim Gratz]

To Thomas:

I agree that we owe a debt of gratitude to GPH for revealing who Odio's visitors were. I am proud (but know I shouldn't be) that Mark and I were the first to name them in print in "Solares Hill". I also agree with you that the fact that Oswald was already at Odio's (at least per Murgado) has significant implications not yet fully explored.

To Chris:

As I recall AV pretty much implied that DAP was MB but would never expressly confirm it.

Now re Veciana's story, it is possible of course that he just made it up, a possibility that some conspiracy theorists would consider rank heresy. But it is clear from his story that he had had a dispute with MB, and the story he told could have been "payback time".

But whether the story is true or not, IMO there is no way he would have told it if he had been recruited into the assassination plot by the man he knew as MB.

You state that "either AV was lying or EHH was lying". I say to the contrary, that whether AV was lying or not, EHH clearly was. Because if EHH story is true, AV was part of the plot, recruited by the man he knew was MB. If that is true, no way AV would have told the story about seeing MB with LHO, whether it was a true story or simply his fiction. There is no way AV would have wanted to have investigators focus on the man who recruited him into the plot. So since there is NO QUESTION that AV told that story to Gaeton Fonzi, regardless of whether it was true or made up by AV for whatever reasons he may have had, no way AV was part of the plot. So the conclusion follows as surely as night follows the day that EEH lied about that.

[William Kelly]

Cuba on our Minds - Christopher Lydon of Open Source Boston interviews David Kaiser.

Incomplete Transcript available on the right.

http://multimedia.boston.com/pub/m/1938407...r.htm?pageid=66

BK

[John Simkin]

Cuba on our Minds - Christopher Lydon of Open Source Boston interviews David Kaiser.

Incomplete Transcript available on the right.

http://multimedia.boston.com/pub/m/1938407...r.htm?pageid=66

BK

Thank you for that. Kaiser is very quick to correct Lydon's view that the CIA was involved in the assassination.

I thought it was very funny when Lydon asked Kaiser why not more historians do not tackle subjects like the JFK assassination and he replied that there were some people interested in the truth, but it was a "speciality market".

I thought Kaiser made some good points about U.S foreign policy over the last 60 years during the last section of the interview.

[William Kelly]

Kelly on Kaiser's The Road to Dallas:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

[John Simkin]

Kelly on Kaiser's The Road to Dallas:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Great review. Will you be doing one on Jeff Morley's Our Man in Mexico.

[William Kelly]

Kelly on Kaiser's The Road to Dallas:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Great review. Will you be doing one on Jeff Morley's Our Man in Mexico.

Done:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

And got the interesting feedback from Catherine:

Catherine said... I am a relative of the "vivacious" Paula Murray Scott, married to Win Scott, and mother to Michael. The other incontrovertible fact about their relationship is that the circumstances surrounding her death (cause of death) remain, to this day, unexplained -- "mysterious".

She was my great aunt, by all accounts a woman of great beauty and intelligence.

Her family were told that she had died of cancer, although she had never complained of any symptoms to them in her frequent contacts with them.

Yet another unsolved mystery. It is curious that Michael Scott has been fated to work on a program about unsolved mysteries.

April 22, 2008 8:34 PM

[William Kelly]

Kelly on Kaiser's The Road to Dallas:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Great review. Will you be doing one on Jeff Morley's Our Man in Mexico.

Done:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

And got the interesting feedback from Catherine:

Catherine said... I am a relative of the "vivacious" Paula Murray Scott, married to Win Scott, and mother to Michael. The other incontrovertible fact about their relationship is that the circumstances surrounding her death (cause of death) remain, to this day, unexplained -- "mysterious".

She was my great aunt, by all accounts a woman of great beauty and intelligence.

Her family were told that she had died of cancer, although she had never complained of any symptoms to them in her frequent contacts with them.

Yet another unsolved mystery. It is curious that Michael Scott has been fated to work on a program about unsolved mysteries.

April 22, 2008 8:34 PM

I moved this post over to the Jeff Morley and Our Man In Mexico thread, so this thread can concentrate on Kaiser's The Road To Dallas.

I'd like to hear from some others who have read the book.

Also, the radio interview is interesting and worthy of more comments.

I am wondering if Kaiser's association with the Naval War College had any influence on him trying to peg the square mob into the round hole?

Does the CIA and ONI owe Kaiser a favor for doing this?

BK

[John Simkin]

Christopher Lydon asks Kaiser what was the most important information he found from the declassified documents that convinced him that JFK had been killed as a result of a conspiracy. He replies that the key figure in the evidence is Loran Hall and his links to John Martino and Santo Trafficante.

This is also the main theme in his book. In the interview and in his book he gives the impression that he has found new evidence that shows that the Mafia was involved in the assassination. This is not the case. In fact, the only new evidence he provides is the phone interview he carried out with Martino’s son. However, this only repeats the story that was well told in Larry Hancock’s “Someone Would Have Talked”. Interestingly, Kaiser does not mention the use of Larry’s book in his research. In my view, an unforgivable crime for an historian to commit. I wonder if he allows his students to get away with this sort of thing with their essays.

He argues his case by reworking evidence that has been available for sometime. He focuses in on Loran Hall because of his imprisonment with Santo Trafficante and his meeting with John Martino in June 1963. It is these associations that Kaiser uses to claim that the Mafia was behind the conspiracy to kill JFK. However, during 1963 he also had meetings and did work for Rip Robertson, a CIA official. Yet, he does not use these evidence to suggest the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK. Nor does he explore Martino’s relationship with the CIA. While he is willing to use the hearsay confessions of Mafia lawyers like Frank Ragano, he does not deal with the hearsay confession made by David Morales to a respectable and reliable businessman. This is very strange as Kaiser told us on the forum that historians should not use confessions as evidence. However, it is clear from his book, that it is alright to use confessions as long as it supports the theory you are peddling.

In fact, Morales does not appear anywhere in the book. How can anyone write a book about the assassination with mentioning Morales? Kaiser also does not mention the Carl Jenkins/Ch Chi Quintero confession. Again, they are two people who do not appear in the book. If Kaiser does not believe these confessions, he should at least explain why he does not believe them. It is not that he is unaware of these confessions because like me he attended Larry Hancock’s talk at the Lancer conference when he discussed this material and showed the filmed interview with Gene Wheaton. The reason he does not deal with Morales and Jenkins in his book is because they were both CIA officials. As he claims in the book and in the radio interview, he has not come across any evidence that the CIA was involved in the assassination. It is the same reason why Kaiser does not deal with the declassified information from Winston Scott and John Whitten concerning the assassination. George Joannides is also not looked at in any detail.

In the radio interview and in his book, Kaiser claims that it was undoubtedly Loran Hall and Lee Harvey Oswald who visited Sylvia Odio on 25th September 1963.

He quotes from the FBI interview of Hall carried out by Leon Brown on 16th September, 1964:

HALL stated that during the latter part of September, 1963, he was in Dallas, Texas in company with LAWRENCE HOWARD and WILLIAM SEYMOUR. HALL had gone to Dallas to solicit aid in the anti-CASTRO movement HALL said they contacted three professors at the university of Dallas who are Cuban refugees. One of these professor's name HALL recalled, was ODIO. These professors furnished HALL with a list of Cubans living in the Dallas area who could be contacted to solicit assistance in this movement.

HALL said that he recalled that while in Dallas on this particular occasion, the three of them, HALL, HOWARD, and SEYMOUR, had gone to the apartment of a Cuban woman who lived in a garden style apartment located on Magellan Circle in Dallas. HALL said that he could not picture this woman in his mind now. He said that her name was possibly ODIO. He said that he seemed to recognize this woman's name as ODIO because of the association with the name of the Cuban professor who had the same name.

He also quotes from the Warren Commission Report on this event:

On September 16, 1964, the FBI located Loran Eugene Hall in Johnsondale, Calif. Hall has been identified as a participant in numerous anti-Castro activities. He told the FBI that in September of 1963 he was in Dallas, soliciting aid in connection with anti-Castro activities. He said he had visited Mrs. Odio. He was accompanied by Lawrence Howard, a Mexican-American from East Los Angeles and one William Seymour from Arizona. He stated that Seymour is similar in appearance to Lee Harvey Oswald; he speaks only a few words of Spanish, as Mrs. Odio had testified one of the men who visited her did. While the FBI had not yet completed its investigation into this matter at the time the report went to press, the Commission has concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio's apartment in September of 1963.

The Warren Report was published itself on 27th September so you can see it was very difficult to get in anything at all from the Hall interview carried out on 16th September.

What Kaiser does not point out is that Hall said that he could not positively identify Odio without seeing a photograph of her. Four days later, the FBI returned with a photograph of Odio. He then said quite clearly that this was not the woman who he visited with Howard and Seymour. When the FBI traced Seymour he was able to prove that he was not able to have visited Odio on 16th September.

As Steve Thomas pointed out, the FBI report dated 9th November, 1964, reveals that when Sylvia Odio was shown photographs of Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard and William Seymour, she clearly stated that none of these men visited her apartment. This view was supported by her sister, Annie Odio, who was also shown these photographs.

Kaiser does not consider the photographic evidence referred to above. It cannot be because he was unaware of it as he tells us he read all the relevant declassified documents. The only possible reason for this omission is that it does not support his theory. This is not what you expect from a historian. As far as I am concerned, his reputation as a reputable historian is in tatters.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

As far as I am concerned, his reputation as a reputable historian is in tatters.

I recently read David Kaiser's chapter on the Tippit murder. It is nothing more than a summary of Dale Myers' book, or more accurately a rehash of Myers' many errors and omissions, some of which have already been completely debunked on this forum.

[William Kelly]

As far as I am concerned, his reputation as a reputable historian is in tatters.

I recently read David Kaiser's chapter on the Tippit murder. It is nothing more than a summary of Dale Myers' book, or more accurately a rehash of Myers' many errors and omissions, some of which have already been completely debunked on this forum.

Kaiser acknowledges that he only spent four or five years researching this book, and for most serious JFK assassination researchers, that's just getting your feet wet.

Kaiser also acknowledges reliance on not on G. Robert Blakley, but Anna K. Nelson, who he mistakingly identifies as the head of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), a designation that befalls Federal Judge John Tunheim.

Besides Ms. AKN, the distinguished American University professor of History, there were three other distinguished historians on the ARRB, none of whom have yet used their unique position to write about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Ms. AKN however, did contribute a chapter to a book on secrecy, in which she misstated the purpose of the JFK Act and the role of the Review Board, and got basic facts about the asssassination wrong.

Kaiser should not be condemned for relying on such disreputable characters, or coming to untenable conclusions common among conspiracy theorists, but he should be thanked for bringing these issues to the table.

BK

[John Simkin]

Kelly on Kaiser's The Road to Dallas:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Great review. Will you be doing one on Jeff Morley's Our Man in Mexico.

Done:

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

And got the interesting feedback from Catherine:

Catherine said... I am a relative of the "vivacious" Paula Murray Scott, married to Win Scott, and mother to Michael. The other incontrovertible fact about their relationship is that the circumstances surrounding her death (cause of death) remain, to this day, unexplained -- "mysterious".

She was my great aunt, by all accounts a woman of great beauty and intelligence.

Her family were told that she had died of cancer, although she had never complained of any symptoms to them in her frequent contacts with them.

Yet another unsolved mystery. It is curious that Michael Scott has been fated to work on a program about unsolved mysteries.

April 22, 2008 8:34 PM

I moved this post over to the Jeff Morley and Our Man In Mexico thread, so this thread can concentrate on Kaiser's The Road To Dallas.

I'd like to hear from some others who have read the book.

Also, the radio interview is interesting and worthy of more comments.

I am wondering if Kaiser's association with the Naval War College had any influence on him trying to peg the square mob into the round hole?

Does the CIA and ONI owe Kaiser a favor for doing this?

BK

I have added a link to this review from my JFK index page. I have also added it to my page on you.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKkellyW.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKindex.htm

[William Kelly]

Question for David Kaiser.

I'd like to ask David Kaiser if he believes that the national security and the Constitution were violated by the assassination of President Kennedy, and if our security is still endangered by the unresolved nature of the crime?

Thanks,

Bill Kelly

[William Kelly]

David Kaiser credits Dan Moldea with being the first to postulate that organized crime was behind the assassination of JFK. He is scheduled to be at the Wecht Symposium in October and was featured with John Judge and others at the American University symposium on Oliver Stone's "JFK" film. After Moldea made his case for the mob, John Judge resonded with the following:

Thanks to Vince Palamara for providing this tape. - BK

John Judge

American University Symposium on Oliver Stone's film "JFK"

CSPAN – (Circa 1991-2)

Moderator: You favor opening the archives. I wonder whether you have any preliminary hypothesis about what would be found there if the Archives were open?

John Judge: I think more important than what specifically remains in the Archives -

Norman Mailer compared it to a Mercedes Benz that's been left I think he said up in Harlem for twenty years, in terms of what we might find, we do have lists of what went in so we can compare it with what comes out.

But I think more important is the principle that these records are public information and it belong to us, the people of the United States, and not to any secret government or intelligence network, or any president, or any Congress who are merely hired by us to do our bidding anyway.

(Applause)

Thomas Jefferson said that if given a choice between a government with no newspapers or newspapers with no a government, he would always choose the latter. Of course he never had a chance to read the Washington Post or New York Times, but…(Laughter, Applause)

But the principle he was getting at is that democracy doesn't work unless the people are educated. And he said that the final repository, the ultimate repository of all knowledge must rest with the people, and there's no one else who is good enough or smart enough to invest that control in, in a truly democratic society.

And we call for a full opening of the files, not dribbled out through pre-censorship like Freedom of Information Act documents, with pieces missing, not to selected historians, or medical experts, not to a special prosecutor or yet another Congressional investigation, but to the people themselves.

And much of this that we know about the Kennedy case, and the evidence of conspiracy comes from the hard work of independent, individual investigators – whose names are not mentioned in large part in the film - Mae Brussell, Penn Jones, Sylvia Meagher, Jochem Joestin, Paris Flamonde,…and that's only a few. The current researchers Robert Groden and Philip Melanson (and others) are still continuing to follow the evidence.

When that material comes out, they will be little pieces in the jigsaw puzzle, in the

Mosaic. But we've had enough out in these many years to solve the case. There is enough of the picture visible in the record and the historical view that we've had to get to the bottom of it.

So I don't see the files ultimately as holding a smoking gun, but rather telling us one more time what the government did or did not find out about the case.

I would like to support the film. I think that outside of films done by Civil War buffs who try to get every uniform and every rifle right, that Oliver Stone has done the most historically accurate work on the Kennedy assassination to date.

The reason it struck a nerve is that this is the hidden secret in the American psyche since that day, November 22, '63, the American public have known, and I would contend have been told over and over, that there was a conspiracy to kill the President of the United States, the people who did it got away with it, and that we can't touch them.

I think that's a large part of why so few people vote today.

But Stone has gone into that darkness and shown a light, and looked at things.

And I think the conclusion of his film is right.

I think from my own work, I have read the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission….You know Alen Dulles, when he was asked about releasing the evidence by Hale Boggs, replied, "Go ahead and print it, nobody will read it anyway."

And unfortunate, especially now, in this post-literate generation, Stone's film is about the only thing that will reach youth. There are a few of us who read still, but as you know, the FBI is trying to get our names from the library. (Laughter)

So this has crossed over the line, and that's why it's so disturbing.

But let me tell you two stories to end, that convinced me that it was not only a conspiracy but a conspiracy well beyond the capability of any Mafia Goon, of any CIA Schleper, of any renegade element in U.S. intelligence, of any oilmen with a beef, these are the layers of the onion that were planted at the beginning, so we'd never see the core.

My mother worked for twenty five, thirty years all together, but for twenty five years for the deputy chief of staff in the personnel office at the Pentagon, directly under the Chief of Staff. She was the highest paid women employee at the Pentagon; she was five levels above top security. I mentioned to Fletcher Prouty the other day that I worked from the bottom up and he worked from the top down and we met at the Joint Chiefs.

My mother's job was to project overall national draft call figures five years in advance. She had to predict an annual national service call that had to be right within a hundred people either way, five years ahead.

She knew from those projections and the information she got that they were withdrawing from Vietnam.

And if you want to get a hold of the papers that prove Prouty's point, I just got this today from the Government Printing Office, Foreign Relations of the United States 61-63, (holding up book) the State Department papers are released in Volume IV of the Vietnam series. This is August to December 1963, and the security memoranda are in there that talk about Kennedy's plan. It's been backed up by Arthur Schlesinger and more recently, yesterday I believe, or the day before in the New York Times, by Roger Hillsman.

He (Kennedy) was pulling out, my mother knew that because she had to project those kinds of figures.

I asked her after she retired when did they tell you they were going to escalate in Vietnam? Because she had to be one of the first to know.

She said late November, 1963.

I said, the last week in November?

She said yes, the Monday following the assassination.

I said was this a few more advisors, a change in policy?

She said I couldn't believe the figures.

She said I took them back to the Joint Chiefs, in what must have been the first protest by a civilian against the war in Vietnam.

She said these figures can't be right. And they said you'll use them. They said that the war would last ten years and 57,000 would die, and to figure that in.

I also talked to SAC bomber pilots, Strategic Air Command bomber pilots, who had the responsibility for nuclear and emergency response, who were in the air on regular shifts, 24 hour hours a day, they were in the air over Wright Pat Air Force base when they heard the news that Kennedy was shot. They ran to open lockers that contain the cryptographic code books that allows them to tell when the President is calling them and to take orders to allow them to go to their fail safe points and nuclear war. There was not a pilot in the air that hour, over Wright Pat anyway, and I would contend that was the case everywhere else, there was no reason to isolate it, that there were no code books in those lockers.

We know from Pierre Salinger's book, that there was no code book aboard Air Force II, bringing the entire cabinet back, returning from important meetings that changed the course in Vietnam within days.

They were in the air and had no way to communicate with the White House and the president.

There's nobody who can touch those book outside the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the highest levels of Defense Intelligence, and at every level of my work, the Office of Naval Intelligence is who rears its head on a mechanic level, and the Industrial Security Command.This is the background of Oswald and Guy Bannister and Jack Ruby, when we go into them.

And whatever is in the records will merely back that up. The physical evidence is already in front of us.

We know that one lone nut, with a rifle that lost the war for the Italians during World War II, which couldn't shoot a bullet lined up with its own scope, didn't do the damage in Dallas.

But Kennedy wasn't all that was killed that day, Democracy died. (Applause)

Edited June 19, 2008 by William Kelly

[William Kelly]

Question for David Kaiser.

I'd like to ask David Kaiser if he believes that the national security and the Constitution were violated by the assassination of President Kennedy, and if our security is still endangered by the unresolved nature of the crime?

Thanks,

Bill Kelly

I hope we can recruit David Kaiser back to the forum to answer some more questions.

BK