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Harrison Salisbury and JFK


John Simkin

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Does anyone know anything about Harrison Salisbury's reporting on the assassination of JFK?

Greetings John;

I have been very busy lately 7 missed this thread.

Salisbury IS AN INTERESTING PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY in the JFK MURDER SAGA.

According to his autobiography IN OUR TIME

he was a college dropout who became national editor of the nyt when the assassination occurred, 7 was in charge of the Times's

COVERAGE of the event.

salisbury, by his own account, immediately decided that Lee Oswald was guilty,

based on NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER,

and you can read his sorry story

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

P.S. In the comments in his autobiography it is claimed that SALISBURY won a Pulitzer Prize.

That claim is a fraud

Edited by J. Raymond Carroll
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In the fall of 1966, we heard at LIFE multiple reports that Salisbury was heading a team from the NYT investigating the Kennedy assassination. However, we never found any footprints from this purported team in the field. It may have been a mirage.

JT

Does anyone know anything about Harrison Salisbury's reporting on the assassination of JFK?

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

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It may have been a mirage.

earlier I misnamed his autobiography. it reveals a lot about his thought process

http://books.google.com/books?id=4_EqAAAAMAAJ&q=oswald#search_anchor

as you can see from the snippets, salisbury solved the case in his own mind

as soon as the arrest of Lee Oswald was announced.

the 1966 mirage seems to have been a further investigation of Oswald's background,

which supposedly got shelved when Salisbury was invited to visit North Vietnam.

i'm guessing that the Garrison Mardi Gras gave them the excuse to forget about it.

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David Lifton has sent me a copy of Harrison Sailsbury's review of "Best Evidence" on 22nd February, 1981.

We live in the 18th year since John Fitzgerald Kennedy's life was brought to an end on a bright November day in Dallas, Texas. The shelves are burdened with reports of official investigations and the endless tomes of inquiring scholars, sensational scribblers and assassination freaks.

When will it end? Not soon. Four days after the assassination, in a memorandum to myself (I was in charge of The New York Times's coverage and inquiry into the Kennedy assassination), I wrote:

''The echoes of this killing will resound down the corridors of our history for years and years and years. It is so strange, so bizarre, so incredible, so susceptible to legend making. It matches Lincoln's assassination and may well have equal public effects.''

The latest addition to the assassination literature, ''Best Evidence'' by David S. Lifton, underscores that observation. Nor will this new entry bring an end to what has become a macabre industry.

Mr. Lifton's work has been introduced by Macmillan with fanfare. The advertisements blazon ''The Coffin Was Empty.'' Review copies come with a handy kit of ready-to-ask questions for television interviewers too busy to read the book. There are charts and photographs to provide the all-important visuals.

Mr. Lifton's basic concern is to show that it was physically possible that Mr. Kennedy's body could have fallen into the hands of unknown conspirators some time between 2:18 P.M. November 22, when it was (supposedly) loaded onto Air Force One in Dallas, and about 8 P.M., when it was officially observed arriving at the Bethesda Naval Hospital morgue, where the autopsy was conducted. During this interval, Mr. Lifton postulates, what he calls ''medical forgery'' could have been perpetrated to change the nature of Kennedy's wounds.

Mr. Lifton does not seem very certain about who might have carried out this complicated caper. In fact, he seems to find himself in a state of creative exhaustion after so many years of burrowing in minutiae for materials with which to concoct his elaborate and sometimes almost incomprehensible timetable of the movements of coffins, coffin guard teams, doctors, Secret Service agents, F.B.I. men, Kennedy people and, of course, the actual body of J.F.K.

But, if I read him right, Mr. Lifton suspects several sinister forces - possibly Lyndon Baines Johnson, possibly the C.I.A., possibly the F.B.I., possibly parties unknown. The only thing of which he seems strongly convinced is that Lee Harvey Oswald was, in his words, ''a patsy.'' Mr. Lifton is willing to concede, I think (these points are not always a model of clarity) that Oswald was in the Texas School Book Depository; that Oswald was equipped with a rifle, though he doesn't believe it was the one Oswald ordered from a mail-order house; and that Oswald may have fired one or more shots from that sixth-floor window. But all that is, to Mr. Lifton's way of reasoning, designed only to set Oswald up as a fall guy so that the actual killers, whom he believes assembled on the ''grassy knoll,'' could make their getaway unsuspected by anyone except Mr. Lifton. As to what may have motivated the killers - forget it. Mr. Lifton is too busy with his timetables, his tape recorders, his interviews and his own personal reactions to bother with that.

The ''real'' assassins - and this is the whole point of Mr. Lifton's 747 pages of dense prose - had to alter Kennedy's body so that the autopsy, the inquest, the medics, the reporters, the investigators, the whole world would believe that the assassin was Oswald and not the sinister forces who caused a ''puff of smoke'' on the ''grassy knoll.'' This was no easy task. But, as Mr. Lifton describes it, the assassins were willing to go to any lengths: manipulation of evidence, use of two or more coffins, exchanges of coffins carried out so rapidly it makes the head spin, squads of undercover conspirators (not one of whom has ever been identified) and possible subversion of security personnel. So it was, he concludes, that the conspirators were able to steal the corpse of J.F.K. from under the eyes of his widow and the Kennedy party and accomplish the ''brain-wound forgery'' that threw us all off the track and caused the Warren Commission and almost everyone except Mr. Lifton to suppose that Oswald fired those bullets.

No says Mr. Lifton. The bullets came from the front, from the grassy knoll where so many critics, as he calls them, think they can see a blurred man with gun in hand in one of the snapshots taken of the area.

Well, I guess you can say that no one before Mr. Lifton has constructed a theory so complicated, so quirky, in such violation of every law of common sense and reason. But that is not to say that his efforts will not be surpassed in the future. So far as I know, Mr. Lifton is the first to advance the ''empty coffin'' notion. But it was bound to come. Years ago, when I was a young reporter in Chicago, I had to produce each year a story to run on April 14, the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. I well remember one such story, which was headlined ''The Coffin Was Empty.'' I got it from an elderly Lincoln buff who claimed that the accepted Lincoln assassination story was a cover-up, that in fact Lincoln had never been shot, that he had wearied of life in the White House and had stage-managed the scene with John Wilkes Booth. The old man claimed that Lincoln had lived on a farm in some backwater of southern Illinois until well into the 1880's. Seven million people had seen Lincoln's black coffin in the procession that made its way from Washington to Philadelphia to New York and west to Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago and Springfield. They did not know that the coffin was empty.

So it goes. Probably after the year 2000 the Kennedy assassination books will begin to thin out, but mark my word, 2063 will bring a new spate.

But out of all of this, I suspect, not one tangible piece of new evidence will be established: not one new witness who will say, ''Yes, I saw the killer''; not one man who will say, ''Yes, I helped forge the surgical evidence''; not one new bullet, not one new accomplice, no mastermind, no evidence of involvement of L.B.J., Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, the K.G.B., the C.I.A., the K.K.K., oil millionaires, Maoists, fascists or members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

The labor of Mr. Lifton is the best evidence for my assertion. He has worked 15 or 16 years. He has interviewed hundreds of persons; he has read, so he says, everything. But he has made no case. He has tried to count all the trees in the forest and prove that others have sometimes identified an ash as a maple or an oak as a willow. But he has given us no vision of the forest equal to the one presented by the ordinary working reporters who threw themselves into the inquiry a few moments after John Kennedy was shot.

But none of this will halt the tide of rumor. Psychologically, we cannot now, and probably never will be able to, accept the mean notion that one social misfit with a mail-order gun could bring an end to the dream of Camelot.

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Guest Robert Morrow

Harrison Salisbury was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I do not know what year he joined.

Salisbury directed NY Times coverage of the JFK assassination for several years. Which means he dropped the ball in a big, big way. It is worth underscoring again and again the critical role that the US intelligence dominated Council on Foreign Relations played in the attempted and failed cover up of the JFK assassination.

In order to understand the media complicity in the cover up of the JFK assassination, one has to understand the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes It was politically, professionally and socially unacceptable to report on the truth of the JFK assassination ... because the murderers were in the White House, the CIA and some of America's top businessmen. The media performed the role of the townspeople raving about the "new clothes" of the butt naked emperor (Warren Commission, LBJ, etc.)

Almost everytime you see a media figure on TV say something really stupid about the JFK assassination (lone nutter advocacy) just google "Talking Head Name CFR" and see what pops up. 99% of the time it is a CFR member. The CFR and the CIA are joined at the hip.

A special word about the Council on Relations role in the 1963 Coup d’Etat and cover up: no other organization has been more responsible for the murder and cover up of John Kennedy than the CFR. The inner core of the CFR are high level US intelligence men who have used CFR members as a horse jockeys, whipping the media with their riding crops to tow the CIA line.

Elite CFR members such as Allen Dulles (CIA), CIA Nelson Rockefeller (CIA, George Herbert Walker Bush (CIA) and CIA McGeorge Bundy (CIA) were probably sponsors of the JFK assassination. Certainly leadership CFR members such as Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Gerald Ford played the most critical roles in the Warren Commission farce. Add in cover up roles played by McGeorge Bundy (CFR/CIA), Nelson Rockefeller (CFR/CIA), Henry Kissinger (CFR/CIA), Richard Helms (CFR/CIA), William Colby (CFR/CIA), Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR), Jack Valenti (CFR), Bill Moyers (CFR), Henry Luce (CFR), Clair Boothe Luce (CFR), C.D. Jackson (CFR) William Coleman (CFR), James Reston NY Times (CFR), Anthony Lewis NY Times (CFR), Harrison Salisbury NY Times (CFR) William F. Buckley (CFR/CIA), William Paley CBS (CFR), Walter Cronkite CBS (CFR), Dan Rather CBS (CFR), Bob Schieffer CBS (CFR), Barry Bingham, Sr. (CFR), Peter Jennings ABC (CFR), Daniel Schorr (CFR), Arthur Ochs Sulzberger NY Times (CFR), Michael Eisner Disney (CFR), Harrison Salisbury NY Times (CFR), Kenneth Gilmore Readers’ Digest (CFR), Tom Braden (CFR/CIA), Stephen Rosenfeld Washington Post (CFR), Bobbie Ray Inman (CFR/CIA), Arnold de Borchgrave (CFR), Donald Rumsfeld (CFR), Rupert Murdoch FOX (CFR), John McCain (CFR), Robert Gates CIA (CFR)… the list is almost endless. Note two things: 1) they are the key establishment players of BOTH major political parties spanning decades 2) their power and influence is directly proportional to the fantastic whoppers they tell about the 1963 Coup d’Etat. For the older CFR members it is a case of PARTICIPATION and COVER UP in the JFK assassination. For the younger ones such as Bill Clinton (CFR), Douglas G. Brinkley (CFR), George Will (CFR/ABC), Charles Krauthammer (CFR/FOX), Bill Kristol (CFR/FOX), David Gergen (CFR), John Segenthaler (CFR), Frank Sesno (CFR), Evan Thomas (CFR), Michael Beschloss (CFR), Stephen M. Walt (CFR), George Stephanopolous (CFR/ABC), Jonathan Alter (CFR), Evan Thomas (CFR), Brian Williams (CFR/NBC), Daniel Pipes (CFR), Michael Gerson (CFR) it is a case of WILLFUL IGNORANCE as they still push the Big Lie. Note: Chris Matthews of Hardball, another willfully ignorant man, is close friends with Richard Haass, current president of CFR. I have never seen highly acclaimed political guru Michael Barone, a Bilderberger attendee, ever say anything credible on the JFK assassination.

Question: do we really expect the CFR to admit that some of its CIA inner circle members slaughtered John Kennedy and many more played integral roles in the cover up? No, but it is important to highlight that the Council on Foreign Relations has stunk up the place with tremendous amounts of radioactive horse manure relating to the 1963 Coup d’Etat.

Edited by Robert Morrow
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Geez, how many times do we have to hear that mantra about people "not being able to accept" that a demented loser could singlehandedly kill a powerful figure like JFK? I can't tell you how many times I've heard this rationale, recited literally word for word, by the likes of Geraldo Rivera, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Howard Stern, Noam Chomsky, Stephen King and an untold number of other movers and shakers. They don't even vary it the least bit. Okay, we get it- we understood you the first thousand times!

"Left" and "Right" blend together on this issue, as they do on all matters of real significance. They present a unified front, and chant robotically, "There was no conspiracy!"

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Don,

If they keep repeating it enough times it must make it so.

These guys better decide whether its better hanging on the cross or banging in the nails.

Currently they are showing stigmata.

Ed

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Harrison Salisbury was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. I do not know what year he joined.

Salisbury directed NY Times coverage of the JFK assassination for several years. Which means he dropped the ball in a big, big way. It is worth underscoring again and again the critical role that the US intelligence dominated Council on Foreign Relations played in the attempted and failed cover up of the JFK assassination.

In order to understand the media complicity in the cover up of the JFK assassination, one has to understand the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes It was politically, professionally and socially unacceptable to report on the truth of the JFK assassination ... because the murderers were in the White House, the CIA and some of America's top businessmen. The media performed the role of the townspeople raving about the "new clothes" of the butt naked emperor (Warren Commission, LBJ, etc.)

Almost everytime you see a media figure on TV say something really stupid about the JFK assassination (lone nutter advocacy) just google "Talking Head Name CFR" and see what pops up. 99% of the time it is a CFR member. The CFR and the CIA are joined at the hip.

A special word about the Council on Relations role in the 1963 Coup d'Etat and cover up: no other organization has been more responsible for the murder and cover up of John Kennedy than the CFR. The inner core of the CFR are high level US intelligence men who have used CFR members as a horse jockeys, whipping the media with their riding crops to tow the CIA line.

Elite CFR members such as Allen Dulles (CIA), CIA Nelson Rockefeller (CIA, George Herbert Walker Bush (CIA) and CIA McGeorge Bundy (CIA) were probably sponsors of the JFK assassination. Certainly leadership CFR members such as Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and Gerald Ford played the most critical roles in the Warren Commission farce. Add in cover up roles played by McGeorge Bundy (CFR/CIA), Nelson Rockefeller (CFR/CIA), Henry Kissinger (CFR/CIA), Richard Helms (CFR/CIA), William Colby (CFR/CIA), Nicholas Katzenbach (CFR), Jack Valenti (CFR), Bill Moyers (CFR), Henry Luce (CFR), Clair Boothe Luce (CFR), C.D. Jackson (CFR) William Coleman (CFR), James Reston NY Times (CFR), Anthony Lewis NY Times (CFR), Harrison Salisbury NY Times (CFR) William F. Buckley (CFR/CIA), William Paley CBS (CFR), Walter Cronkite CBS (CFR), Dan Rather CBS (CFR), Bob Schieffer CBS (CFR), Barry Bingham, Sr. (CFR), Peter Jennings ABC (CFR), Daniel Schorr (CFR), Arthur Ochs Sulzberger NY Times (CFR), Michael Eisner Disney (CFR), Harrison Salisbury NY Times (CFR), Kenneth Gilmore Readers' Digest (CFR), Tom Braden (CFR/CIA), Stephen Rosenfeld Washington Post (CFR), Bobbie Ray Inman (CFR/CIA), Arnold de Borchgrave (CFR), Donald Rumsfeld (CFR), Rupert Murdoch FOX (CFR), John McCain (CFR), Robert Gates CIA (CFR)… the list is almost endless. Note two things: 1) they are the key establishment players of BOTH major political parties spanning decades 2) their power and influence is directly proportional to the fantastic whoppers they tell about the 1963 Coup d'Etat. For the older CFR members it is a case of PARTICIPATION and COVER UP in the JFK assassination. For the younger ones such as Bill Clinton (CFR), Douglas G. Brinkley (CFR), George Will (CFR/ABC), Charles Krauthammer (CFR/FOX), Bill Kristol (CFR/FOX), David Gergen (CFR), John Segenthaler (CFR), Frank Sesno (CFR), Evan Thomas (CFR), Michael Beschloss (CFR), Stephen M. Walt (CFR), George Stephanopolous (CFR/ABC), Jonathan Alter (CFR), Evan Thomas (CFR), Brian Williams (CFR/NBC), Daniel Pipes (CFR), Michael Gerson (CFR) it is a case of WILLFUL IGNORANCE as they still push the Big Lie. Note: Chris Matthews of Hardball, another willfully ignorant man, is close friends with Richard Haass, current president of CFR. I have never seen highly acclaimed political guru Michael Barone, a Bilderberger attendee, ever say anything credible on the JFK assassination.

Question: do we really expect the CFR to admit that some of its CIA inner circle members slaughtered John Kennedy and many more played integral roles in the cover up? No, but it is important to highlight that the Council on Foreign Relations has stunk up the place with tremendous amounts of radioactive horse manure relating to the 1963 Coup d'Etat.

One of the biographies of Allen Dulles mentions that he was at the CFR HQ in NYC at the time of the assassination.

Can anyone confirm this?

BK

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