Robert McNamara

[John Simkin]

Robert McNamara has died:

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

[Guest Tom Scully]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...70601197_5.html

...McNamara is survived by his second wife Diana, who he married in 2004....

So far, only eight (out of 800...) news stories include his wife's name, "Byfield":

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&hl=...l&scoring=n

Four of the eight articles that include his wife's full name are not U.S. media sources.

McNamara's marriage, at age 88, to the widow of Patrick Hoy's employer is the strangest coincidence (is it coincidence...?) related to my research into the JFK assassination, and incurious major media stenographers have never shown any interest.

Ernest Byfield's mother, Gladys Tartiere, ex-wife of Ernest Byfield Sr., rented her 400 acres Glen Ora estate to JFK and Jackie for nearly all of JFK's presidency.

Byfield Sr. hired and mentored Patrick Hoy,and Hoy became president of the Byfields'

Sherman Hotel group and where he became friends at the Sherman group's "Pump Room" with Irv Kupcinet who held court nightly in that room for nearly fifty years. Hoy and Kupcinet both become close to many major media personalities and organized crime figures.

Before he married Diana Masiere Byfield McNamara, Ernest Byfield Jr. was married to white Russian noble woman Vala Osterman, who was the sister of Nina, married to Placido Ervesun, first cousin of Rionda Braga, the Cuban sugar magnate who was the father of the man George HW Bush handed off Edward G. Hooker's daughter to, at her wedding. Vala Byfield was previously married to a Franco regime foreign ministry official, Pelayo Garcia Olay, who Ernest Hemingway spied on in Havana during WWII. In his book, "The Fish Is Red", (page 79) William Turner relates that Braga boasted to the WSJ, just weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, that Cuba would soon be purged of Castro. JFK monitored and then scuttled the Bay of Pigs Op while he was weekending at Byfield's mother, Gladys's Glen Ora estate.

In 1968, Ernest Byfield Jr., former OSS SI army captain, was a McCann Erickson ad agency executive. McCann Erickson's cooperation with the CIA in South America is detailed here.

Henry Crown hired Patrick Hoy as a V.P. at General Dynamics corporate, and as president of Gen Dyn's Material Service Div. in Chicago, the Crown family company merged with Gen. Dyn. in 1959. Hoy allegedly knew Jack Ruby and was said to be the man who persuaded Conrad Hilton and Henry Crown to put mob lawyer Sidney Korshak on permanent retainer.

Ernest Byfield Jr. served as best man at the 1943 wedding of William HG Fitzgerald.

Edited July 6, 2009 by Tom Scully

[John Simkin]

Article by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...id=sec-politics

Robert S. McNamara's last message to his wife, Diana, was typical, no nonsense. "No funeral/memorial service" was the way it began.

But he continued, "I leave this earth believing that I have been blessed with a wife, children and friends who have brought me love and happiness beyond compare." To this not-very-religious man, "Heaven . . . will be to remain in their hearts and memories as warm and close as we were in life."

My wife and I were among those lucky enough to be among those friends. Over 20 years, we had many dinners together, often followed by Kennedy Center symphonic concerts for music we all loved. A little over three months ago, at one of his last public outings, we had lunch together at the Cosmos Club with our wives. He was lucid but frail. Hopeful about initial steps taken by President Obama on nuclear weapons, but fearful about the nation's growing involvement in Afghanistan -- a situation so much like Vietnam.

Nuclear weapons and Vietnam were the way he and I first met, but back in the 1960s, it was in a totally different context. During an 18-month sabbatical from journalism, I worked for Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Over those months, then-Defense Secretary McNamara was first an architect of the successful U.S. response to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and, the next year, a proponent of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. In the fall of 1963, McNamara and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor recommended a reduction of U.S. troops acting as trainers in Vietnam because they thought the war was going well and that -- another belief that turned out to be wrong -- they could use the reduction to force the leaders of South Vietnam to reform their government.

Later, however, McNamara presided over not just the buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal but also the enormous enlargement and public justification of the Vietnam War, actions that were destructive abroad and here at home. Those decisions in the 1960s haunted him until the day he died.

Initially, with his move from the Pentagon to the World Bank, he appeared to want to make up for a destructive past with a creative future. But those 13 years of trying to do good for the less fortunate around the world did not shake the demons still within him. Neither did the books he wrote or co-wrote about the war. Introspection took hold in the 1990s, as he tried to understand others' sharp criticism of his books, in which he initially disclosed his privately voiced opposition to the war while still at the Pentagon.

But it was in his interviews with filmmaker Errol Morris, which became the Oscar-winning 2004 documentary "The Fog of War," and during the many conversations he had with students who had seen the film, that he began to find peace with himself.

In the film, McNamara said, "At my age, 85, I'm at an age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on."

"Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning" was one lesson headlined in the Morris film that has direct application to today. "What makes us omniscient?" asked McNamara, referring to Vietnam but also looking at the world then around him. "Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

In November 1967, McNamara presented President Lyndon B. Johnson with a memo that said: "The course we're on is totally wrong. We've got to change it. Cut back at what we're doing in Vietnam. We've got to reduce the casualties."

McNamara, in the film, said he told Johnson, "I know that it may contain recommendations and statements that you do not agree with and do not support," and added: "I never heard from him."

Thereafter, among rumors in Washington that McNamara was facing a nervous breakdown, the announcement came that he was leaving to go to the World Bank.

In another move that has echoes in recent years, McNamara said of his time with Johnson: "That's the way it ended. Except for one thing: He awarded me the Medal of Freedom in a very beautiful ceremony at the White House. And he was very, very warm in his comments. And I became so emotional, I could not respond."

In his last major article, titled "Apocalypse Soon" and published in Foreign Policy magazine in 2005, McNamara expressed his concerns about the immorality and danger of placing reliance on nuclear weapons as foreign policy tools. He particularly focused on the United States and Russia having the weapons on alert. Those arms "are potent signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions," he wrote.

In that final message to his wife, he summed up his hope of the future: for "others continuing to pursue the objectives which I have sought (very imperfectly at times) to move the world toward peace among people and nations and to accelerate economic and social progress for the least advantaged among us."

[Christopher Hall]

This is an aritcle about MCNamara's days at Ford Motor Company.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/07/07/robert-...con-dead-at-93/

I didn't know that he developed the Falcon.

[William Kelly]

This is an aritcle about MCNamara's days at Ford Motor Company.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/07/07/robert-...con-dead-at-93/

I didn't know that he developed the Falcon.

I don't think Mac "developed" the Falcon. He was only there a month, and can't be given credit for the company's turnaround either.

It was the Ford Foundation that is the suspicious entity of the company.

As for McNamara, one of his hiking and mountain climbing buddies was Dr. Robert Livingtston, who became somewhat of a conspiracy hero to Prof. Fetzer & Company and contributed to his anthology Assassination Science.

Dr. Livingston had an office at Bathesda near Dr./Col. Jose Rivera, and ran the Neurobiological lab.

Dr. Livingston also lived and worked in San Diego, where Dr. Lt. Commander Narut (USN) was stationed, another neuroboiological research scientist who helped develop the Navy's assassin training program, or so he was quoted in the London Sunday Times.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Livingston_(scientist)

http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v4n2/v4n2part4.pdf

258) Dr. Robert B. Livingston, chief of the U.S. Neurobiological Labora-tory; Scientific Director of both the National Institute for Mental Health and the National Institute fo Neurological Diseases and Blindness in both the Eisenhower and Kennedy aministrations (deceased):

a) 5/2/92 letter/ fax to Harry Livingstone ("Killing The Truth", pp. 114-115; "Killing Kennedy", p. 7, 193, 207, 208, 216, 276, 316, 354; "Bloody Treason" by Noel Twyman, pp. 201-202; for the actual letter, in the form of a letter to Lifton, see "Assassination Science", pp. 168-171)---Livingston told Dr. Humes before the autopsy started that the Dallas doctors saw an entry bullet wound in the throat; "Also relevant, I learned from a former classmate of mine from Stanford who was then a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Richard Dudman, that he was one of the White House press group that accompanied the President to Dallas. Not getting much information from the Parkland Hospital, Dick went out to inspect the Lincoln limousine in which the President and Connally and their wives had been riding. He thought he saw, for certain, that there was a through-and-through hole in the upper left margin of the windshield. He de-scribed the spaling-splintering of glass at the margins as though the missile had entered from in front of the vehicle. When he reached over to pass his pen-cil or pen through the hole to test its patency, an FBI or Secret Service man roughly drew him away and shooed him off, instructing him that he wasn't al-lowed to come so close to that vehicle.."; "Incidently, sometime later, I learned that the Secret Service had ordered from the Ford Motor Company a number of identical Lincoln limousine windshields---"for target practice.";

11/18/93 New York news conference (see "Killing Kennedy", p. 396, for a re-print of the Richard Pyle [of AP] wire story, as well as "Assassination Science", pp. 161-166 [full-length version], and "Bloody Treason", pp. 201-202)---extended version of his 5/92 letter to Lifton/ fax to Livingstone cited above;

c) 11/22/93 presentation at the ASK conference in Dallas, TX (see "Bloody Treason", pp. 193, 201-202)---see reference "a)" above;

d) 1/20/94 interview with Harry Livingstone ("Killing Kennedy", pp. 266-267)---"The Supplemental Autopsy Report stated that the brain weighed 1,500 grams, much too heavy and more than an average adult male brain, let alone one that had lost much of its mass. The fixative formalin solution could not add any sig-nificant amount to the brain weight.";

e) 7/7/94 letter to Noel Twyman ("Bloody Treason", p. 89)---"The autopsy pa-thologists also did not dissect the throat wound to see where it went, despite being informed by telephone before the autopsy (as a suggestion) to do so by the chief of the U.S. Neurological Laboratory at the time, Dr. Robert Livingston.";

f) two filmed segments in Prof. James Fetzer's 1994 video "JFK: The Assassina-tion, The Cover-up, and Beyond"---Livingston reads his prepared remarks origi-nating from his 5/92 letter/ fax: see pages 170-171 of "Assassination Science";

g) interviews with Noel Twyman ("Bloody Treason", pages xi and 190; see also pages 89, 193, 201, and 202)---"provided many hours of consultation and ad-vice";

h) "Assassination Science" by Prof. James Fetzer (1997/1998), numerous, esp. pages 161-175 and 366[for photos of Livingston himself, see pages 166 and 194]---Livingston was one of the contributors to this book; "Robert Livingston

THE JFK MEDICAL REFERENCE ASSASSINATION RESEARCH / Vol.

15 Part 4: Miscellaneous

4 No. 2 Copyright 2006 Vincent M. Palamara

has concluded that diagrams of the brain in the National Archives must be of some brain other than that of John F. Kennedy.";

i) Murder In Dealey Plaza by James Fetzer (2000), pages v, 8, 113, 138, 212, 259, 261, 285, 297, 300, 306, 310, 421

j) The Men Who Killed Kennedy (2003) DVD

[Ron Ecker]

Can anyone think of a non-sinister reason why the Pentagon on 11/22/63 did not inform its own boss, McNamara, of the assassination?

According to Manchester, McNamara and JCS Chairman Taylor were informed simultaneously, and McNamara "acted quickly." According to a Taylor biography by his son, Taylor informed McNamara. But according to McNamara's own account in his book In Retrospect, not only did no one at the Pentagon inform him but, when he did learn of the shooting from an outside source, he remained oddly incurious (an ignorance plus lack of curiosity that is strikingly mirrored by JCS Vice Chairman Richard Myers on 9/11, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also exhibiting all the curiosity of a dead cat).

McNamara says in his book that he was in a budget meeting "at about 2:00 P.M" (1:00 P.M. Dallas time) when his secretary told him of an urgent personal call. It was from Robert Kennedy, who told him that JFK had been shot. What did McNamara then do? Nothing. He says "we simply did not know what to do," so he continued his budget meeting. (Behavior again mirrored on 9/11 by Rumsfeld's Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz.) The meeting continued for about 45 minutes, when a second call came from Robert Kennedy, informing McNamara that JFK was dead.

At no point during all that time did Taylor or anyone else at the Pentagon let McNamara know what had happened in Dallas. Moreover, McNamara did absolutely nothing to find out what was happening after first being informed by RFK by JFK had been shot.

Go figure.

[Karl Kinaski]

Can anyone think of a non-sinister reason why the Pentagon on 11/22/63 did not inform its own boss, McNamara, of the assassination?

According to Manchester, McNamara and JCS Chairman Taylor were informed simultaneously, and McNamara "acted quickly." According to a Taylor biography by his son, Taylor informed McNamara. But according to McNamara's own account in his book In Retrospect, not only did no one at the Pentagon inform him but, when he did learn of the shooting from an outside source, he remained oddly incurious (an ignorance plus lack of curiosity that is strikingly mirrored by JCS Vice Chairman Richard Myers on 9/11, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also exhibiting all the curiosity of a dead cat).

McNamara says in his book that he was in a budget meeting "at about 2:00 P.M" (1:00 P.M. Dallas time) when his secretary told him of an urgent personal call. It was from Robert Kennedy, who told him that JFK had been shot. What did McNamara then do? Nothing. He says "we simply did not know what to do," so he continued his budget meeting. (Behavior again mirrored on 9/11 by Rumsfeld's Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz.) The meeting continued for about 45 minutes, when a second call came from Robert Kennedy, informing McNamara that JFK was dead.

At no point during all that time did Taylor or anyone else at the Pentagon let McNamara know what had happened in Dallas. Moreover, McNamara did absolutely nothing to find out what was happening after first being informed by RFK by JFK had been shot.

Go figure.

Well, McN. immediately sent Mac Bundy in his Secretary-Limo to the Withe House, where he took over the Oval Office. (source THE COLOR OF TRUTH by Kai Bird) But, yes, it's odd. At 2pm W.D.C. time, the SS in Dallas knew, that Kennedy was dead. The message provided to McNamra was, that sombody shot at the president. And hit him.

I guess someone in the pentagon knew at that time, that the president, in fact, was dead. But nobody felt the necessity to inform McNamara, (and Taylor) that early. The secretary of defense and the JCS were sitting around for another 45 minutes!

KK

Edited July 9, 2009 by Karl Kinaski