Seymour Hersh: Assassination Of JFK Was Form Of “justice”

[Douglas Caddy]

Seymour Hersh: Assassination Of JFK Was Form Of “justice”

"Just didn’t have the guts to put in writing what I came to believe… was an inevitable conclusion,” he wrote.

By James Kirchick

BuzzFeed Contributor

posted Apr 11, 2012 9:51am EDT

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jamiekirchick/seymour-hersh-assassination-of-jfk-was-form-of-l-55m2

[click on link to view Hersh letter]

"There might have been some justice" in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said in a letter to a reader.

Hersh made the shocking suggestion in 1998 correspondence with Albert Alioto, a San Francisco bus driver who had written to the New Yorker journalist about his controversial book about the Kennedy clan, The Dark Side of Camelot.

“If your portraits of John and Robert Kennedy are essentially accurate, given the emphasis on assassination plotting,” Alioto asked, “do you see any moral difference between the Kennedys and Oswald and Sirhan?” Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were, respectively, the killers of JFK and his younger brother Robert.

“The morality of JFK in comparison with Oswald and/or Sirhan,” are “obvious questions,” wrote Hersh — whose latest story for the New Yorker alleges that the United States is training members of an Iranian terrorist group in Nevada. The 35th president’s backing of assassination attempts against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Hersh explained, meant that he was as immoral the men who took his and his brother’s lives.

“I just didn’t have the guts to put in writing what I came to believe, as you do, was an inevitable conclusion,” Hersh wrote of the death of a president, which he also called “terrible.”

Hersh appears to have taken Alioto’s letter to be an endorsement of Kennedy’s assassination as a form of payback for plotting against Castro, which Alioto said he didn’t intend.

“I was not trying to say that the assassinations of the Kennedys were a form of justice,” Alioto, 58, wrote in a letter this year. (He shared the 1998 document after seeing this reporter’s criticism of Hersh in the magazine Commentary.) “I didn’t regard his book as ‘essentially accurate.’” To stress his purely conjectural intentions, Alioto told Hersh that, on the subject of any moral equivalence between JFK, RFK and their assassins, “I ask the question purely out of curiosity.”

Hersh made his view clear: “You’re right in believing, if that’s what your letter suggested, that there might have been some justice — one reviewer wrote ‘rough justice’ -- in John F. Kennedy’s terrible death by assassination, a means he had sought to end Fidel Castro’s life.”

The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1997, was enormously controversial for its thinly-sourced claims, and Hersh suffered professional embarrassment when it was revealed that he had been fooled by a series of fake documents bearing the late president’s signature. Hersh was forced to remove mention of the papers from the book’s galleys at the last minute. Hersh was initially able to parlay the documents into a television deal with NBC, which later pulled out over “creative differences” with Hersh and suspicions that the documents were fake. (Some of the book’s then-scandalous claims about the slain president’s promiscuity gained credence this year in a memoir published this year by one of Kennedy's former lovers, Mimi Alford.)

According to Hersh, it was this widespread negative reaction to the book, and not any factual or moral misgivings, which prevented him from making the comparison between “Oswald and/or Sirhan” and JFK explicit. “I had enough trouble getting through the reviews and press comments on my book, and its very unpopular conclusions about Kennedy’s presidency, without getting into the issue you raise,” Hersh wrote.

Asked about the letter, which appears to have been typed on a blank sheet of paper, Hersh did not deny authoring it but expressed surprise because he tends to write on New Yorker letterhead. He didn’t reply to an email inquiry through a colleague that included a scan of the letter.

James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor for The New Republic and World Affairs Journal.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

What a piece of abject garbage is Hersh. No wonder the CIA's lips move so fast for him.

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I heartily recommend the book the "Dark Side of Camelot." It is one of my top 5 books for understanding the JFK assassination. It has key passages about how Lyndon Johnson actually got on the 1960 Democratic ticket. And it talks about how close LBJ was to being destroyed on 11/22/63. It has some good anecdotes about how much William King Harvey and Henry Kissinger disliked the Kennedys. Kissinger has a story about JFK and RFK were being served soup at a meeting ... and no one else was, Kissinger fumed.

And Hersh's four Secret Service agents who testified about JFK's over the top sexual antics were pretty much confirmed by Mimi Alford who described the exact same Kennedy behavior in her book.

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Camelot-Seymour-Hersh/dp/0316360678/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334286474&sr=1-1

Speaking of filthiness ...

On p. 11 of the Dark Side of Camelot, Hersh interviewed Sidney Mickelson, owner of the high end Mickelson Gallery. Mickelson said that President John Kennedy used to send over photos of sexual exploits to be framed by Mickelson as momentos for the folks involved.

Mickelson said, "over a number of years we framed a number of photographs of people - naked and often lying on beds - in the Lincoln Room. The women were always beautiful." In some cases the photographs included the president with, as Mickelson carefully described it, "a group of people with masks on." Another memorable photograph, Mickelson added, involved the president and two women, all wearing masks. "The Secret Service agent said it was Kennedy," Mickelson told me, "and I have no reason to doubt it." The photographs were always of high quality, Mickelson added, similar to those taken by official White House photographers." [seymour Hersh, the Dark Side of Camlelot, p. 11]

The real question is, what does Seymour Hersh think of the JFK assassination in the year 2012 as opposed to 1998? Has he changed his views?

[B. A. Copeland]

What a CIA piece of filth....pardon.

[Kathleen Collins]

Seymour Hersh: Assassination Of JFK Was Form Of "justice"

"Just didn't have the guts to put in writing what I came to believe… was an inevitable conclusion," he wrote.

By James Kirchick

BuzzFeed Contributor

posted Apr 11, 2012 9:51am EDT

http://www.buzzfeed....-form-of-l-55m2

[click on link to view Hersh letter]

"There might have been some justice" in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said in a letter to a reader.

Hersh made the shocking suggestion in 1998 correspondence with Albert Alioto, a San Francisco bus driver who had written to the New Yorker journalist about his controversial book about the Kennedy clan, The Dark Side of Camelot.

"If your portraits of John and Robert Kennedy are essentially accurate, given the emphasis on assassination plotting," Alioto asked, "do you see any moral difference between the Kennedys and Oswald and Sirhan?" Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were, respectively, the killers of JFK and his younger brother Robert.

"The morality of JFK in comparison with Oswald and/or Sirhan," are "obvious questions," wrote Hersh — whose latest story for the New Yorker alleges that the United States is training members of an Iranian terrorist group in Nevada. The 35th president's backing of assassination attempts against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Hersh explained, meant that he was as immoral the men who took his and his brother's lives.

"I just didn't have the guts to put in writing what I came to believe, as you do, was an inevitable conclusion," Hersh wrote of the death of a president, which he also called "terrible."

Hersh appears to have taken Alioto's letter to be an endorsement of Kennedy's assassination as a form of payback for plotting against Castro, which Alioto said he didn't intend.

"I was not trying to say that the assassinations of the Kennedys were a form of justice," Alioto, 58, wrote in a letter this year. (He shared the 1998 document after seeing this reporter's criticism of Hersh in the magazine Commentary.) "I didn't regard his book as 'essentially accurate.'" To stress his purely conjectural intentions, Alioto told Hersh that, on the subject of any moral equivalence between JFK, RFK and their assassins, "I ask the question purely out of curiosity."

Hersh made his view clear: "You're right in believing, if that's what your letter suggested, that there might have been some justice — one reviewer wrote 'rough justice' -- in John F. Kennedy's terrible death by assassination, a means he had sought to end Fidel Castro's life."

The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1997, was enormously controversial for its thinly-sourced claims, and Hersh suffered professional embarrassment when it was revealed that he had been fooled by a series of fake documents bearing the late president's signature. Hersh was forced to remove mention of the papers from the book's galleys at the last minute. Hersh was initially able to parlay the documents into a television deal with NBC, which later pulled out over "creative differences" with Hersh and suspicions that the documents were fake. (Some of the book's then-scandalous claims about the slain president's promiscuity gained credence this year in a memoir published this year by one of Kennedy's former lovers, Mimi Alford.)

According to Hersh, it was this widespread negative reaction to the book, and not any factual or moral misgivings, which prevented him from making the comparison between "Oswald and/or Sirhan" and JFK explicit. "I had enough trouble getting through the reviews and press comments on my book, and its very unpopular conclusions about Kennedy's presidency, without getting into the issue you raise," Hersh wrote.

Asked about the letter, which appears to have been typed on a blank sheet of paper, Hersh did not deny authoring it but expressed surprise because he tends to write on New Yorker letterhead. He didn't reply to an email inquiry through a colleague that included a scan of the letter.

James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor for The New Republic and World Affairs Journal.

There has never been proof that the Kennedys were going to kill Castro. The CIA was trying to do so -- exploding cigars, poison. He was not planning to kill Castro but his joint chiefs of staff wanted to and Kennedy was afraid they were going to send a missile to Cuba without letting him know. Kennedy was using back channels to Castro, trying to end the feud amicably. On November 25 he was going to sign a document that he was going to pull out all the "advisors" by December of 1964 -- ask Greg Burnham. He was not planning Castro's death. Right now, I think Castro is dead.

So this was going to be a secret operation between the 2 brothers. I don't believe it. But the CIA and the Cuban-Exiles may have decided someone must leave and they turned around and killed Kennedy in the hope that Castro would be blamed and the military could do something to Castro. But Johnson and Hoover claimed LHO killed JFK. There was a cover-up. Johnson signed a document to put troops into Viet Nam.

But the lingering question: Why didn't the Kennedys investigate what happened? Why? Fear of death?

Kathy C

Edited April 14, 2012 by Kathleen Collins

[Dawn Meredith]

A true Douche Bag is exposed in all of his filthiness.

Really. Such total slime. Anthony Summers' book "Conspiracy" was out by 1980 and goes into incredible detail, in the chapter "Countdown to Conspiracy" the back channel efforts of Castro and JFK towards detente. But CIA scum like Hersh need not bother with checking the facts. Just make em up and become a bestseller.

Thanks Doug Caddy for bringing this exchange to our attention.

"Justice". Wow.

Dawn

[Dawn Meredith]

Seymour Hersh: Assassination Of JFK Was Form Of "justice"

"Just didn't have the guts to put in writing what I came to believe… was an inevitable conclusion," he wrote.

By James Kirchick

BuzzFeed Contributor

posted Apr 11, 2012 9:51am EDT

http://www.buzzfeed....-form-of-l-55m2

[click on link to view Hersh letter]

"There might have been some justice" in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said in a letter to a reader.

Hersh made the shocking suggestion in 1998 correspondence with Albert Alioto, a San Francisco bus driver who had written to the New Yorker journalist about his controversial book about the Kennedy clan, The Dark Side of Camelot.

"If your portraits of John and Robert Kennedy are essentially accurate, given the emphasis on assassination plotting," Alioto asked, "do you see any moral difference between the Kennedys and Oswald and Sirhan?" Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were, respectively, the killers of JFK and his younger brother Robert.

"The morality of JFK in comparison with Oswald and/or Sirhan," are "obvious questions," wrote Hersh — whose latest story for the New Yorker alleges that the United States is training members of an Iranian terrorist group in Nevada. The 35th president's backing of assassination attempts against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Hersh explained, meant that he was as immoral the men who took his and his brother's lives.

"I just didn't have the guts to put in writing what I came to believe, as you do, was an inevitable conclusion," Hersh wrote of the death of a president, which he also called "terrible."

Hersh appears to have taken Alioto's letter to be an endorsement of Kennedy's assassination as a form of payback for plotting against Castro, which Alioto said he didn't intend.

"I was not trying to say that the assassinations of the Kennedys were a form of justice," Alioto, 58, wrote in a letter this year. (He shared the 1998 document after seeing this reporter's criticism of Hersh in the magazine Commentary.) "I didn't regard his book as 'essentially accurate.'" To stress his purely conjectural intentions, Alioto told Hersh that, on the subject of any moral equivalence between JFK, RFK and their assassins, "I ask the question purely out of curiosity."

Hersh made his view clear: "You're right in believing, if that's what your letter suggested, that there might have been some justice — one reviewer wrote 'rough justice' -- in John F. Kennedy's terrible death by assassination, a means he had sought to end Fidel Castro's life."

The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1997, was enormously controversial for its thinly-sourced claims, and Hersh suffered professional embarrassment when it was revealed that he had been fooled by a series of fake documents bearing the late president's signature. Hersh was forced to remove mention of the papers from the book's galleys at the last minute. Hersh was initially able to parlay the documents into a television deal with NBC, which later pulled out over "creative differences" with Hersh and suspicions that the documents were fake. (Some of the book's then-scandalous claims about the slain president's promiscuity gained credence this year in a memoir published this year by one of Kennedy's former lovers, Mimi Alford.)

According to Hersh, it was this widespread negative reaction to the book, and not any factual or moral misgivings, which prevented him from making the comparison between "Oswald and/or Sirhan" and JFK explicit. "I had enough trouble getting through the reviews and press comments on my book, and its very unpopular conclusions about Kennedy's presidency, without getting into the issue you raise," Hersh wrote.

Asked about the letter, which appears to have been typed on a blank sheet of paper, Hersh did not deny authoring it but expressed surprise because he tends to write on New Yorker letterhead. He didn't reply to an email inquiry through a colleague that included a scan of the letter.

James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor for The New Republic and World Affairs Journal.

There has never been proof that the Kennedys were going to kill Castro. The CIA was trying to do so -- exploding cigars, poison. He was not planning to kill Castro but his joint chiefs of staff wanted to and Kennedy was afraid they were going to send a missile to Cuba without letting him know. Kennedy was using back channels to Castro, trying to end the feud amicably. On December 1st he was going to sign a document that he was going to pull out all the "advisors" by December of 1964 -- ask Greg Burnham. He was not planning Castro's death. Right now, I think Castro is dead.

So this was going to be a secret operation between the 2 brothers. I don't believe it. But the CIA and the Cuban-Exiles may have decided someone must leave and they turned around and killed Kennedy in the hope that Castro would be blamed and the military could do something to Castro. But Johnson and Hoover claimed LHO killed JFK. There was a cover-up. Johnson signed a document to put troops into Viet Nam.

But the lingering question: Why didn't the Kennedys investigate what happened? Why? Fear of death?

Kathy C

Cathy: They DID investigate. And you may not have noticed but Bobby was assassinated by the same forces, Ted was set up by the same forces and JFK Jr was blown out of the sky, imho. I get so tired of THAT particular question about a family who gave so much.

Dawn

[Len Colby]

Cathy: They DID investigate. And you may not have noticed but Bobby was assassinated by the same forces, Ted was set up by the same forces and JFK Jr was blown out of the sky, imho. I get so tired of THAT particular question about a family who gave so much.

Dawn

Ted set himself up and his nephew's recklessness in flying into a situation beyond his a abilities is the most likely explanation for the crash. I am unaware of evidence Teddy was investigating the assassination or that 'John-John' was doing so in anything more than the superficial style of George.

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I think Ted Kennedy with his drinking and driving was completely responsible for his Chappaquiddick accident and indirectly and unintentionally the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

Just read the book "The Senator: My Ten Years with Ted Kennedy" by Richard Burke, a very close aide for Sen. Ted Kennedy, which goes into great detail on Ted Kennedy's alcoholism, cocaine use, poppers, and rampant and unhinged womanizing. When you do stuff like that, accidents do tend to happen.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Senator-Ten-Years-Kennedy/dp/0312304668/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334351781&sr=8-1#_

As for the death of John Kennedy, Jr. I do not think foul play was involved in that either; apparently he got stuck in a "white out" situation and crashed his plane. I do not think the Bushes, the Clintons or the CIA or anyone else killed JFK, Jr.

Re: Ted Kennedy, I do the think the government and the military were spying on him in the 1970's. The may have been related to the cover up of the JFK assassination or it may have been related to Operation Watch Tower and military/government drug smuggling. The army was spying on key politicians to see if they knew anything about the drug smuggling the government was doing.

Read the Affidavit of Edward P. Cutolo 3/11/1980.

http://www.afrocubaweb.com/news/cutolo.htm

"19. The surveillance was unofficially dubbed Operation George Orwell based on the theme of the surveillance and the George Orwell published work 1984.

20. I instituted surveillance against Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Edward King, Michael Dukakis, Levin H. Campbell, Andrew A. Caffey, Fred Johnston, Kenneth A. Chandler, Thomas P. O'Neill to name a few of the targets. Surveillance at my orders was instituted at the Governors' residences of Massachusetts, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire. The Catholic cathedrals of New York and Boston were placed under electronic surveillance also. In the area of Ft. Devens, all local police and politicians were under some sort of surveillance at various times.

21 I specifically used individuals from the 441st Military Intelligence Detachment and 402 Army Security Agency Detachment assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group to supplement the Sats tasked with carrying out Operation Orwell."

[Dawn Meredith]

Cathy: They DID investigate. And you may not have noticed but Bobby was assassinated by the same forces, Ted was set up by the same forces and JFK Jr was blown out of the sky, imho. I get so tired of THAT particular question about a family who gave so much.

Dawn

Ted set himself up and his nephew's recklessness in flying into a situation beyond his a abilities is the most likely explanation for the crash. I am unaware of evidence Teddy was investigating the assassination or that 'John-John' was doing so in anything more than the superficial style of George.

Wow, I am honored to have two of the deepest thinkers at the EF disagree with me re Ted and his nephew. I lived in Boston when this event occurred. I saw Ted Kennedy on tv and his story was not credible in the least. I have been to the scene. Driven over the bridge. The account presented by Robert Cutler and Richard E. Sprague makes the most sense to me. Simpkin posted here at Ef a few years back. I had already been familiar with this research as I knew Bob Cutler in MA. Not well, but saw him present. I give you something to ponder from these very pages.

Dawn

Richard E. Sprague has some interesting information about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.

The Power Control Group faced up to the Ted Kennedy and Kennedy family problem very early. They used the threat against the Kennedy children's lives very effectively between 1963 and 1968 to silence Bobby and the rest of the family and friends who knew the truth. It was necessary to assassinate Bobby in 1968 because with the power of the presidency he could have prevented the Group from harming the children. When Teddy began making moves to run for president in 1969 for the 1972 election, the Group decided to put some real action behind their threats. Killing Teddy in 1969 would have been too much. They selected a new way of eliminating him as a candidate. They framed him with the death of a young girl, and threw sexual overtones in for good measure.

Here is what happened according to Robert Cutler's (You the Jury - 1974) analysis of the evidence. The Group hired several men and at least one woman to be at Chappaquiddick during the weekend of the yacht race and the planned party on the island. They ambushed Ted and Mary Jo after they left the cottage and knocked Ted out with blows to his head and body. They took the unconscious or semi-conscious Kennedy to Martha's Vineyard and deposited him in his hotel room. Another group took Mary Jo to the bridge in Ted's car, force fed her with a knock out potion of alcoholic beverage, placed her in the back seat, and caused the car to accelerate off the side of the bridge into the water. They broke the windows on one side of the car to insure the entry of water; then they watched the car until they were sure Mary JO would not escape.

Mary Jo actually regained consciousness and pushed her way to the top of the car (which was actually the bottom of the car - it had landed on its roof) and died from asphyxiation. The group with Teddy revived him early in the morning and let him know he had a problem. Possibly they told him that Mary JO had been kidnapped. They told him his children would be killed if he told anyone what had happened and that he would hear from them. On Chappaquiddick, the other group made contact with Markham and Gargan, Ted's cousin and lawyer. They told both men that Mary JO was at the bottom of the river and that Ted would have to make up a story about it, not revealing the existence of the group. One of the men resembled Ted and his voice sounded something like Ted's. Markham and Gargan were instructed to go the the Vineyard on the morning ferry, tell Ted where Mary JO was, and come back to the island to wait for a phone call at a pay station near the ferry on the Chappaquiddick side.

The two men did as they were told and Ted found out what had happened to Mary JO that morning. The three men returned to the pay phone and received their instructions to concoct a story about the "accident" and to report it to the police. The threat against Ted's children was repeated at that time.

Ted, Markham and Gargan went right away to police chief Arena's office on the Vineyard where Ted reported the so-called "accident." Almost at the same time scuba diver John Farror was pulling Mary JO out of the water, since two boys who had gone fishing earlier that morning had spotted the car and reported it.

Ted called together a small coterie of friends and advisors including family lawyer Burke Marshall, Robert MacNamara, Ted Sorenson, and others. They met on Squaw Island near the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport for three days. At the end of that time they had manufactured the story which Ted told on TV, and later at the inquest. Bob Cutler calls the story, "the shroud." Even the most cursory examination of the story shows it was full of holes and an impossible explanation of what happened. Ted's claim that he made the wrong turn down the dirt road toward the bridge by mistake is an obvious lie. His claim that he swam the channel back to Martha's Vineyard is not believable. His description of how he got out of the car under water and then dove down to try to rescue Mary JO is impossible. Markham and Gargan's claims that they kept diving after Mary JO are also unbelievable.

The evidence for the Cutler scenario is substantial. It begins with the marks on the bridge and the position of the car in the water. The marks show that the car was standing still on the bridge and then accelerated off the edge, moving at a much higher speed than Kennedy claimed. The distance the car travelled in the air also confirms this. The damage to the car on two sides and on top plus the damage to the windshield and the rear view mirror stanchion prove that some of the damage had to have been inflicted before the car left the bridge.

The blood on the back and on the sleeves of Mary JO's blouse proves that a wound was inflicted before she left the bridge. The alcohol in her bloodstream proves she was drugged, since all witnesses testified she never drank and did not drink that night. The fact that she was in the back seat when her body was recovered indicates that is where she was when the car hit the water. There was no way she could have dived downward against the inrushing water and moved from the front to the back seat underneath the upside-down seat back.

The wounds on the back of Ted Kennedy's skull, those just above his ear and the large bump on the top indicate he was knocked out. His actions at the hotel the next morning show he was not aware of Mary JO's death until Markham and Gargan arrived. The trip to the pay phone on Chappaquiddick can only be explained by his receiving a call there, not making one. There were plenty of pay phones in or near Ted's hotel if he needed to make a private call. The tides in the channel and the direction in which Ted claimed he swam do not match. In addition it would have been a superhuman feat to have made it across the channel (as proven by several professionals who subsequently tried it).

Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look's testimony, coupled with the testimony of Ray LaRosa and two Lyons girls, proves that there were two people in Ted's car with Mary Jo at 12:45 pm. The three party members walking along the road south toward the cottage confirmed the time that Mr. Look drove by. He stopped to ask if they needed a ride. Look says that just prior to that he encountered Ted's car parked facing north at the juncture of the main road and the dirt road. It was on a short extension of the north-south section of the road junction to the north of the "T". He says he saw a man driving, a woman in the seat beside him, and what he thought was another woman lying on the back seat. He remembered a portion of the license plate which matched Ted's car, as did the description of the car. Markham, Gargan and Ted's driver's testimony show that someone they talked to in the pitch black night sounded like Ted and was about his height and build.

None of the above evidence was ever explained by Ted or by anyone else at the inquest or at the hearing on the case demanded by district attorney Edward Dinis. No autopsy was ever allowed on Mary JO's body (her family objected), and Ted made it possible to fly her body home for burial rather quickly. Kennedy haters have seized upon Chappaquiddick to enlarge the sexual image now being promoted of both Ted and Jack Kennedy. Books like "Teddy Bare" take full advantage of the situation.

Just which operatives in the Power Control Group at the high levels or the lower levels were on Chappaquiddick Island? No definite evidence has surfaced as yet, except for an indication that there was at least one woman and at least three men, one of whom resembled Ted Kennedy and who sounded like him in the darkness. However, two pieces of testimony in the Watergate hearings provide significant clues as to which of the known JFK case conspirators may have been there.

E. Howard Hunt told of a strange trip to Hyannisport to see a local citizen there about the Chappaquiddick incident. Hunt's cover story on this trip was that he was digging up dirt on Ted Kennedy for use in the 1972 campaign. The story does not make much sense if one questions why Hunt would have to wear a disguise, including his famous red wig, and to use a voice-alteration device to make himself sound like someone else. If, on the other hand, Hunt's purpose was to return to the scene of his crime just to make sure that no one who might have seen his group at the bridge or elsewhere would talk, then the disguise and the voice box make sense.

The other important testimony came from Tony Ulasewicz who said he was ordered by the Plumbers to fly immediately to Chappaquiddick and dig up dirt on Ted. The only problem Tony has is that, according to his testimony, he arrived early on the morning of the "accident", before the whole incident had been made public. Ulasewicz is the right height and weight to resemble Kennedy and with a CIA voice-alteration device he presumably could be made to sound like him. There is a distinct possibility that Hunt and Tony were there when it happened.

The threats by the Power Control Group, the frame-up at Chappaquiddick, and the murders of Jack and Bobby Kennedy cannot have failed to take their toll on all of the Kennedys. Rose, Ted, Jackie, Ethel and the other close family members must be very tired of it all by now. They can certainly not be blamed for hoping it will all go away. Investigations like those proposed by Henry Gonzalez and Thomas Downing only raised the spectre of the powerful Control Group taking revenge by kidnapping some of the seventeen children.

It was no wonder that a close Kennedy friend and ally in California, Representative Burton, said that he would oppose the Downing and Gonzalez resolutions unless Ted Kennedy put his stamp of approval on them. While the sympathies of every decent American go out to them, the future of our country and the freedom of the people to control their own destiny through the election process mean more than the lives of all the Kennedys put together. If John Kennedy were alive today he would probably make the same statement.

Back to top of the page up there ^

MultiQuote

Reply

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Dawn Meredith]

Cathy: They DID investigate. And you may not have noticed but Bobby was assassinated by the same forces, Ted was set up by the same forces and JFK Jr was blown out of the sky, imho. I get so tired of THAT particular question about a family who gave so much.

Dawn

Ted set himself up and his nephew's recklessness in flying into a situation beyond his a abilities is the most likely explanation for the crash. I am unaware of evidence Teddy was investigating the assassination or that 'John-John' was doing so in anything more than the superficial style of George.

Actually JFK Jr. was doing a lot of investigating. But I am not here to do your research because I know you have no interest in truth in any form. So I will just repost a short summary of SOME of the salient evidence regarding what we have been told by MSM and what has been uncovered. There is far more, but I know both you and Robert do not care to actually look into this. So with thanks to Adele Edisen for her summary:

Dawn

-----------------------------------------

04-02-2012 02:48 AM #34 Adele Edisen

View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Send Email

Member Join Date:Sep 2008

Posts:183

Years ago on the Rich DellaRosa forum we had discussions about the death of John Kennedy, Jr., his wife Carolyn, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. About that time John Hankey had introduced his DVDs on the assassination of JFK and one on the death of his son, John, Jr. Along with John, Jr., his wife Carolyn, his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette, and possibly a flight instructor who was thought to have been aboard the Piper Saratoga plane with them perished in an unusual airplane crash in to the sea near Martha's Vinyard where they were to land and drop off Lauren Bessette so she could meet her good friend, Carole Radziwill. They then would proceed to Hyannis Port to spend the weekend at family wedding festivities.

From my readings of books written by John's friends, associates, colleagues, and cousin's wife, Carole Radziwill, I find it entirely possible that John did have a flight instructor with him. He was not quite totally familiar with his newly acquired plane, a Piper Saratoga, so he would very frequently fly with an instructor. Also, he was logging in more instrument-time flying for which he needed to be under the supervision of a flight instructor. Another problem was that he was still using crutches and limping due to an earlier ankle injury. In order to maneuver a plane on the ground, he needed full use of the foot pedals to do this, and probably would have asked his flight instructor to perform this task.

Richard Blow, an editor of his GEORGE Magazine spoke with him on that Friday afternoon before he left for the airport in New Jersey where his plane was stored. John told him that he would have a flight instructor flying with him. Carole Radziwill, who was waiting at Martha's Vinyard Airport the arrival of Lauren Bessette, became greatly concerned when the plane was delayed. She called a flight instructor with whom she was familiar from previous flights to tell his wife of the delay, and was surprised when he answered the phone. Obviously, another instructor had been chosen in New Jersey. She describes her experiences that night in her book, WHAT REMAINS: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love.

John Hankey states that the the body of a flight instructor was not found. We know from the National Transportation Safety Board's Report that the seat in which the flight instructor would have been occupying next to John's pilot seat was missing from the debris found of the wreckage at the bottom of the sea, 150 feet below. The other three occupants' bodies were found strapped in their seats, all of which were bolted to the floor of the cabin. John's flight log which would record details of the flight from take-off to destination would also list passengers and any other personnel, was kept in an aqua colored flight bag. Some luggage and the flight bag washed up on shore, but the flight bag did not contain the Flight Log Book.

John Hankey proposed that the flight istructor was suicidal, or rather had been programmed to be suicidal by the murderers. This was based on the crash of an Egyptian military plane, flying from the US to Egypt in which a deranged pilot had overpowered the pilots in the cabin of the plane and made the plane plunge into the sea. Hankey proposed that the body of the flight instructor had to be removed from John's plane so that it would appear that the only pilot on board was John and the crash could be described as due to pilot error. The perpretrators had plenty of time to accomplish this, as the wreckage was not found for a few days.

However, other investigators have suggestd that some kind of explosive device was placed on the plane before take-off at the New Jersey airport.

Eye-witnesses on the beach overlooking the crash site saw flashes of light in the dark sky about the time of John's plane approach to the Martha's Vinyard Airport. According to the National Transportation Safety Board's Report, the distribution of debris from the plane's crash was very widespread and I would attribute that to an explosion in the air. Rich DellaRosa told me that he thought it had been done with a "pressure bomb". Sherman Skolnick, Scott Meyers, and John DiNaerdo investigators mentioned by Greg Burnham on this topic have concluded similarly.

It is both curious and suspicious that John's plane went down around 9:30 PM, Friday, July 16, 1999. Yet it took all of Saturday, Sunday, Monday until Tuesay when the wreckage was found. According to John Hankey, the Pentagon was brought in to do the searchng and it seems that they were flying in a wide elliptical pattern of about two hundred miles in width along the coast from Martha's Vinyard toward New York. The site of the crash was about seven miles east of Martha's Vinyard and the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the plane just before it crashed had been radioed by John Kennedy to the Martha's Vinyard Airport Tower as was required of planes preparing to land as they drop in altitude to the required 2500 feet before beginning their final descent. There was no haze in the vicinity as reported by other pilots coming to land around that same time, and the airport lights were visible from the air. Since the Airport Tower's radar followed the descent of the plane, the wreckage should have been very easy to locate.

Adele

Last edited by Adele Edisen; 04-03-2012 at 08:28 AM.

[Rodney Rivers]

Cathy: They DID investigate. And you may not have noticed but Bobby was assassinated by the same forces, Ted was set up by the same forces and JFK Jr was blown out of the sky, imho. I get so tired of THAT particular question about a family who gave so much.

Dawn

Ted set himself up and his nephew's recklessness in flying into a situation beyond his a abilities is the most likely explanation for the crash. I am unaware of evidence Teddy was investigating the assassination or that 'John-John' was doing so in anything more than the superficial style of George.

Wow, I am honored to have two of the deepest thinkers at the EF disagree with me re Ted and his nephew. I lived in Boston when this event occurred. I saw Ted Kennedy on tv and his story was not credible in the least. I have been to the scene. Driven over the bridge. The account presented by Robert Cutler and Richard E. Sprague makes the most sense to me. Simpkin posted here at Ef a few years back. I had already been familiar with this research as I knew Bob Cutler in MA. Not well, but saw him present. I give you something to ponder from these very pages.

Dawn

Richard E. Sprague has some interesting information about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.

The Power Control Group faced up to the Ted Kennedy and Kennedy family problem very early. They used the threat against the Kennedy children's lives very effectively between 1963 and 1968 to silence Bobby and the rest of the family and friends who knew the truth. It was necessary to assassinate Bobby in 1968 because with the power of the presidency he could have prevented the Group from harming the children. When Teddy began making moves to run for president in 1969 for the 1972 election, the Group decided to put some real action behind their threats. Killing Teddy in 1969 would have been too much. They selected a new way of eliminating him as a candidate. They framed him with the death of a young girl, and threw sexual overtones in for good measure.

Here is what happened according to Robert Cutler's (You the Jury - 1974) analysis of the evidence. The Group hired several men and at least one woman to be at Chappaquiddick during the weekend of the yacht race and the planned party on the island. They ambushed Ted and Mary Jo after they left the cottage and knocked Ted out with blows to his head and body. They took the unconscious or semi-conscious Kennedy to Martha's Vineyard and deposited him in his hotel room. Another group took Mary Jo to the bridge in Ted's car, force fed her with a knock out potion of alcoholic beverage, placed her in the back seat, and caused the car to accelerate off the side of the bridge into the water. They broke the windows on one side of the car to insure the entry of water; then they watched the car until they were sure Mary JO would not escape.

Mary Jo actually regained consciousness and pushed her way to the top of the car (which was actually the bottom of the car - it had landed on its roof) and died from asphyxiation. The group with Teddy revived him early in the morning and let him know he had a problem. Possibly they told him that Mary JO had been kidnapped. They told him his children would be killed if he told anyone what had happened and that he would hear from them. On Chappaquiddick, the other group made contact with Markham and Gargan, Ted's cousin and lawyer. They told both men that Mary JO was at the bottom of the river and that Ted would have to make up a story about it, not revealing the existence of the group. One of the men resembled Ted and his voice sounded something like Ted's. Markham and Gargan were instructed to go the the Vineyard on the morning ferry, tell Ted where Mary JO was, and come back to the island to wait for a phone call at a pay station near the ferry on the Chappaquiddick side.

The two men did as they were told and Ted found out what had happened to Mary JO that morning. The three men returned to the pay phone and received their instructions to concoct a story about the "accident" and to report it to the police. The threat against Ted's children was repeated at that time.

Ted, Markham and Gargan went right away to police chief Arena's office on the Vineyard where Ted reported the so-called "accident." Almost at the same time scuba diver John Farror was pulling Mary JO out of the water, since two boys who had gone fishing earlier that morning had spotted the car and reported it.

Ted called together a small coterie of friends and advisors including family lawyer Burke Marshall, Robert MacNamara, Ted Sorenson, and others. They met on Squaw Island near the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport for three days. At the end of that time they had manufactured the story which Ted told on TV, and later at the inquest. Bob Cutler calls the story, "the shroud." Even the most cursory examination of the story shows it was full of holes and an impossible explanation of what happened. Ted's claim that he made the wrong turn down the dirt road toward the bridge by mistake is an obvious lie. His claim that he swam the channel back to Martha's Vineyard is not believable. His description of how he got out of the car under water and then dove down to try to rescue Mary JO is impossible. Markham and Gargan's claims that they kept diving after Mary JO are also unbelievable.

The evidence for the Cutler scenario is substantial. It begins with the marks on the bridge and the position of the car in the water. The marks show that the car was standing still on the bridge and then accelerated off the edge, moving at a much higher speed than Kennedy claimed. The distance the car travelled in the air also confirms this. The damage to the car on two sides and on top plus the damage to the windshield and the rear view mirror stanchion prove that some of the damage had to have been inflicted before the car left the bridge.

The blood on the back and on the sleeves of Mary JO's blouse proves that a wound was inflicted before she left the bridge. The alcohol in her bloodstream proves she was drugged, since all witnesses testified she never drank and did not drink that night. The fact that she was in the back seat when her body was recovered indicates that is where she was when the car hit the water. There was no way she could have dived downward against the inrushing water and moved from the front to the back seat underneath the upside-down seat back.

The wounds on the back of Ted Kennedy's skull, those just above his ear and the large bump on the top indicate he was knocked out. His actions at the hotel the next morning show he was not aware of Mary JO's death until Markham and Gargan arrived. The trip to the pay phone on Chappaquiddick can only be explained by his receiving a call there, not making one. There were plenty of pay phones in or near Ted's hotel if he needed to make a private call. The tides in the channel and the direction in which Ted claimed he swam do not match. In addition it would have been a superhuman feat to have made it across the channel (as proven by several professionals who subsequently tried it).

Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look's testimony, coupled with the testimony of Ray LaRosa and two Lyons girls, proves that there were two people in Ted's car with Mary Jo at 12:45 pm. The three party members walking along the road south toward the cottage confirmed the time that Mr. Look drove by. He stopped to ask if they needed a ride. Look says that just prior to that he encountered Ted's car parked facing north at the juncture of the main road and the dirt road. It was on a short extension of the north-south section of the road junction to the north of the "T". He says he saw a man driving, a woman in the seat beside him, and what he thought was another woman lying on the back seat. He remembered a portion of the license plate which matched Ted's car, as did the description of the car. Markham, Gargan and Ted's driver's testimony show that someone they talked to in the pitch black night sounded like Ted and was about his height and build.

None of the above evidence was ever explained by Ted or by anyone else at the inquest or at the hearing on the case demanded by district attorney Edward Dinis. No autopsy was ever allowed on Mary JO's body (her family objected), and Ted made it possible to fly her body home for burial rather quickly. Kennedy haters have seized upon Chappaquiddick to enlarge the sexual image now being promoted of both Ted and Jack Kennedy. Books like "Teddy Bare" take full advantage of the situation.

Just which operatives in the Power Control Group at the high levels or the lower levels were on Chappaquiddick Island? No definite evidence has surfaced as yet, except for an indication that there was at least one woman and at least three men, one of whom resembled Ted Kennedy and who sounded like him in the darkness. However, two pieces of testimony in the Watergate hearings provide significant clues as to which of the known JFK case conspirators may have been there.

E. Howard Hunt told of a strange trip to Hyannisport to see a local citizen there about the Chappaquiddick incident. Hunt's cover story on this trip was that he was digging up dirt on Ted Kennedy for use in the 1972 campaign. The story does not make much sense if one questions why Hunt would have to wear a disguise, including his famous red wig, and to use a voice-alteration device to make himself sound like someone else. If, on the other hand, Hunt's purpose was to return to the scene of his crime just to make sure that no one who might have seen his group at the bridge or elsewhere would talk, then the disguise and the voice box make sense.

The other important testimony came from Tony Ulasewicz who said he was ordered by the Plumbers to fly immediately to Chappaquiddick and dig up dirt on Ted. The only problem Tony has is that, according to his testimony, he arrived early on the morning of the "accident", before the whole incident had been made public. Ulasewicz is the right height and weight to resemble Kennedy and with a CIA voice-alteration device he presumably could be made to sound like him. There is a distinct possibility that Hunt and Tony were there when it happened.

The threats by the Power Control Group, the frame-up at Chappaquiddick, and the murders of Jack and Bobby Kennedy cannot have failed to take their toll on all of the Kennedys. Rose, Ted, Jackie, Ethel and the other close family members must be very tired of it all by now. They can certainly not be blamed for hoping it will all go away. Investigations like those proposed by Henry Gonzalez and Thomas Downing only raised the spectre of the powerful Control Group taking revenge by kidnapping some of the seventeen children.

It was no wonder that a close Kennedy friend and ally in California, Representative Burton, said that he would oppose the Downing and Gonzalez resolutions unless Ted Kennedy put his stamp of approval on them. While the sympathies of every decent American go out to them, the future of our country and the freedom of the people to control their own destiny through the election process mean more than the lives of all the Kennedys put together. If John Kennedy were alive today he would probably make the same statement.

Back to top of the page up there ^

MultiQuote

Reply

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I enjoyed reading that. I did not know of this Power Control Group angle but I could see it making sense. I've always thought that the Kennedy family knew who was behind the JFK hit and still know to this day. Possibly because of this threat, they don't want anyone to pursue it that's in power, like maybe when Bill Clinton was POTUS.

So it begs me to ask, why so much hate for this family from the establishment and those that run the Power control Group(which is probably run by the CIA or other intelligence groups)?? What did the Kennedy's do that was so bad that they all must be eliminated? Maybe something we will never know.

I wonder if this group still exists today in some way. It's interesting the way they described that no autopsy was performed on MJo and her body quickly buried. That's the same thing they did with JFK JR. The buried him @ sea which makes no sense. Wouldn't the family want the son buried in Arlington next to his father and mother?

Looking back the best way they should have handled it is go public. Reveal this group, like people do today. Keeping it to yourself will probably get you killed. Exposing it with the Kennedy name behind them at that time may have been a good countermeasure.

[Guest Tom Scully]

..........

I enjoyed reading that. I did not know of this Power Control Group angle but I could see it making sense. I've always thought that the Kennedy family knew who was behind the JFK hit and still know to this day. Possibly because of this threat, they don't want anyone to pursue it that's in power, like maybe when Bill Clinton was POTUS.

So it begs me to ask, why so much hate for this family from the establishment and those that run the Power control Group(which is probably run by the CIA or other intelligence groups)?? What did the Kennedy's do that was so bad that they all must be eliminated? Maybe something we will never know.

I wonder if this group still exists today in some way. It's interesting the way they described that no autopsy was performed on MJo and her body quickly buried. That's the same thing they did with JFK JR. The buried him @ sea which makes no sense. Wouldn't the family want the son buried in Arlington next to his father and mother?

Looking back the best way they should have handled it is go public. Reveal this group, like people do today. Keeping it to yourself will probably get you killed. Exposing it with the Kennedy name behind them at that time may have been a good countermeasure.

Rodney, they use any means necessary, using their own escalating criteria, to preserve this.:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30iht-edcarroll.4.6900205.html

The peril of valuing celebrity over history

By James Carroll

Published: Monday, July 30, 2007

....Yet, speaking of history, this conjuring of the appearance of opposition where none actually exists has been mandated by the American political system since the onset of the Cold War. The quadrennial political puppet show, highlighting not opposition but its appearance, is essential to keeping the captive-taking war machine running and to inoculating the American people from the viral knowledge that they themselves were first to be captured.

A minimal acquaintance with history, including dissections of American culture already performed by both Sinclairs, would undermine our national complacency. Upton Sinclair, for example, showed the rapaciousness of capitalism, the vampire-like appetite with which it feeds on the blood of human beings. Even with "reforms" ("The Jungle" led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration), the profit-worshipping economy to this day eludes controls that would protect majorities of citizens in this country and across the world. Sinclair Lewis, for his part, showed how the simultaneously banalizing methods of capitalist enterprise (false advertising, consumerism, pieties of affluence, amoral bureaucracy) are exactly what that enterprise created to keep from being criticized. ...

If you are fortunate, they will find an alternative to killing you to significantly lessen their perception of how intensely you threaten their heavily defended "all right, all of the time, right wing political status quo." If you act in a way they perceive as potentially destabilizing, their locked down, predatory capitalism, out you must go. Because they are homicidal, ideological extremists, you only have to act in ways that trigger their most visceral prejudices, if you strike them as having populist leftist leanings, they'll tar you as a fascist.

I assume a powerful incentive for them if they kill you, is that they get to write your obituary.:

http://www.ssa.gov/history/hueywhouse.html

....But only Huey Long would be so brazen as to detail his dreams in a 146-page book published in 1935, on the eve of the 1936 Presidential elections in which Long was expected to be a candidate. In this book, "My First Days in the White House," Huey Long holds imaginary conversations with the nation's power brokers and even names his cabinet appointees and provides the text of the Supreme Court decision that will uphold the constitutionality of his "Share the Wealth" plan. Rarely, if ever, has an American politician be so unguarded in sharing with the nation his little boy dream of someday growing up to be President.....

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/huey.html

HIS POLITICAL AGENDA AS A SENATOR:

Huey Long says he came to the U.S. Senate for only one purpose--to push his "Share The Wealth" philosophy. And push it he did (see the excerpts from the section on his Senate speeches). This excerpt from his autobiography makes the case for the crisis that Long sought to address with his plan.

"I HAD come to the United States Senate with only one project in mind, which was that by every means of action and persuasion I might do something to spread the wealth of the land among all of the people.

I foresaw the depression in 1929. . . I had predicted all of the consequences many years before they occurred.

The wealth of the land was being tied up in the hands of a very few men. The people were not buying because they had nothing with which to buy. The big business interests were not selling, because there was nobody they could sell to.

One per cent of the people could not eat any more than any other one per cent; they could not wear much more than any other one per cent; they could not live in any more houses than any other one per cent. So, in 1929, when the fortune-holders of America grew powerful enough that one per cent of the people owned nearly everything, ninety-nine per cent of the people owned practically nothing, not even enough to pay their debts, a collapse was at hand.

God Almighty had warned against this condition. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and every religious teacher known to this earth had declaimed against it. So it was no new matter, as it was termed, when I propounded the line of thought with the first crash of 1929, that the eventful day had arrived when accumulation at the top by the few had produced a stagnation by which the vast multitude of the people were impoverished at the bottom.

There is no rule so sure as that one that the same mill that grinds out fortunes above a certain size at the top, grinds out paupers at the bottom. The same machine makes them both; and how are they made? There is so much in the world, just so much land, so many houses, so much to eat and so much to wear. There is enough--yea, there is more--than the entire human race can consume, if all are reasonable.

All the people in America cannot eat up the food that is produced in America; all the people in America cannot wear out the clothes that can be made in America; nor can all of the people in America occupy the houses that stand in this country, if all are allowed to share in homes afforded by the nation. But when one man must have more houses to live in than ninety-nine other people; when one man decides he must own more foodstuff than any other ninety-nine people own; when one man decides he must have more goods to w ear for himself and family than any other ninety-nine people, then the condition results that instead of one hundred people sharing the things that are on earth for one hundred people, that one man, through his gluttonous greed, takes over ninety-nine parts for himself and leaves one part for the ninety-nine.

Now what can this one man do with what is intended for ninety-nine? He cannot eat the food that is intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot wear the clothes that are intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot live in ninety-nine houses at the same time; but like the dog in the manger, he can put himself on the load of hay and he can say:

'This food and these clothes and these houses are mine, and while I cannot use them, my greed can only be satisfied by keeping anybody else from having them.'

Wherefore and whence developed the strife in the land of too much, beginning in the year 1929."

(pgs. 291-292)

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=searchResult&absPageId=345269

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/28/obituaries/corliss-lamont-dies-at-93-socialist-battled-mccarthy.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Corliss Lamont Dies at 93; Socialist Battled McCarthy

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Published: April 28, 1995

Corliss Lamont, the Socialist author, teacher and humanist philosopher who battled Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the C.I.A. and other icons of authority in a lifelong fight for civil liberties and international understanding, died on Wednesday at his country home in Ossining, N.Y. He was 93 years old and lived in New York City.

Dr. Lamont died of heart failure, his family said.

Born into wealth, the scion of the chairman of J. P. Morgan & Company, Dr. Lamont grew up with privilege, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University like his father and might have had the life of a patrician on Wall Street. Instead, he cast his lot into the arena of radical causes....

....In the late 1950's, Dr. Lamont won a case against the State Department, which had refused for nearly a decade to issue him a passport on the ground that his travel abroad "would be contrary to the best interests of the United States."

In another court victory, Dr. Lamont won a suit in 1965 against the United States Postmaster General for violating his First Amendment rights by opening and withholding his mail, including propaganda from Peking. The Supreme Court held a 1961 anti-propaganda mail law to be unconstitutional.

Also in 1965, Dr. Lamont won a lawsuit against the C.I.A., which had opened scores of letters mailed or received by him, including some from his wife. A Federal Court declared that "illegal prying into the shared intimacies of husband and wife is despicable."

Throughout his pageant of political and social activities, Dr. Lamont continued to write, producing books on humanist philosophy, the Soviet Union, civil liberties issues and other topics, including intimate portraits of the British poet laureate John Masefield, the educator John Dewey, the philosopher Bertrand Russell and others he had known....

http://hometown-pasadena.com/history/pasadena-became-part-of-upton-sinclair%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98epic%E2%80%99-battleground-part-2-of-2/

When author Upton Sinclair swept the California gubernatorial primaries in August 1934, he achieved a phenomenal feat. Until then, Democrats in California had been a marginal presence, but Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign “brought a Democratic party into existence,” as Baltimore Sun reporter Carey McWilliams recalled in 1982, and was ”the acorn from which evolved the tree of whatever liberalism we have in California,” according to California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk.

But EPIC itself never came to pass. McWilliams remembered that ”[sinclair] was waging this astonishing campaign, but as he was not going to win, the establishment would close in on him.”

Sinclair’s Republican opponent Frank Merriam received support from some of the state’s wealthiest businessmen—among them newspaper giant William Randolph Hearst, L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler, film producer Irving Thalberg, Sunkist chairman C.C. Teague, and MGM Studios head Louis B. Mayer....

...Louis B. Mayer, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who had helped build MGM Studios into a major powerhouse, was also one of the most conservative figures in Hollywood. Chairman of the California Republican Party, he also proudly kept an autographed picture of Benito Mussolini behind his desk, and insisted on celebrating his birthday on the Fourth of July.

Mayer paid to have a huge billboard erected on Wilshire Boulevard depicting Sinclair as an apelike creature dripping blood from his fangs, and paid for newspaper ads, as well as his own anti-Sinclair radio ads, written by screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Worst of all, Mayer threatened to lift money from his employees’ paychecks unless they donated to Frank Merriam.

3c24530v Pasadena: Part of Upton Sinclair’s ‘EPIC’ Battleground (Part 2 of 2) William Randolph Hearst Upton Sinclair socialism Pasadena history Louis B. Mayer Los Angeles Times Frank Merriam 1934 Election photo

Mayer’s partner, producer Irving Thalberg, hired Carey Wilson, screenwriter behind the 1925 silent version of Ben Hur, and Felix E. Feist, son of MGM’s chief sales executive, to produce a series of fake newsreels that would damage Sinclair’s image. Titled “California Election News,” the reels depicted Sinclair supporters as uninformed, slow-witted rustics, or communist sympathizers. “Upton Sinclair is the author of the Russian government and it worked out very well there, and I think it should do here,” said one. Other reels depicted tramps and hobos hopping the rails for California to live off Sinclair’s programs for the unemployed.

93% of the state’s newspapers endorsed Frank Merriam, and the Los Angeles Times warned that all-out war would ensue if Sinclair were elected. “Matches and rocks and clubs are easily procurable and arson, and riot, violence and murder will follow as surely as night the day,” wrote Times columnist Chapin Hall on October 11, 1934. When Turner Catledge, a visiting journalist from the New York Times, asked L.A. Times political editor Kyle Palmer why coverage in the paper appeared so biased, Palmer responded: “We don’t go in for that kind of crap you have in New York of being obliged to print both sides. We’re going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We’re going to kill him.”

Even on Sinclair’s home turf, local newspapers were largely unsympathetic. The Monrovia News-Post called him “devoid of sympathy with American institutions and ideals,” the Verdugo Record-Ledger labeled EPIC “the stepping-stone to State Socialism or other form of collectivism,” and the Pasadena Star-News queried: “Who is there among us that does not believe that election success for Mr. Sinclair would cause rejoicing in Russia and in every other communistic stronghold?”

Anti-Sinclair cartoon from the Los Angeles Examiner. In reality, it was Louis B. Mayer who was an admirer of Mussolini.

Only a few papers, including the Los Angeles Daily News and Pasadena Post gave even-handed coverage to the election, though neither paper endorsed Sinclair.

Other, more subtle tactics were alleged to have been used by Sinclair’s opponents.

In mid-October, 1934, Progressive Party candidate Raymond L. Haight claimed that Merriam officials had attempted to bribe him to leave the race. “Half a dozen of my county and district chairmen are ready to so testify,” he told a United Press reporter on October 17.

On October 19, 1934, the Pasadena Post reported that Superior Court Judge Frank C. Collier of South Pasadena was issuing an order challenging the voter registration status of 24,136 people in the San Gabriel Valley. Though ostensibly a non-partisan investigation, Collier’s political leanings were evident. Several weeks before, he had headed an anti-communist rally before the La Cañada Community Voters’ League, in which he accused the ACLU of defending “the right of a person to advocate murder, assassination or overthrow of the government.”...

http://web.archive.org/web/19990428133550/http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/1998/03/cov_11news.html

The Falwell connection

HOW THE REV. JERRY FALWELL AND A CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ORGANIZATION HELPED FINANCE AND ORCHESTRATE AN EXTENSIVE ANTI-CLINTON PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

BY MURRAY WAAS

A conservative political organization with ties to the Rev. Jerry Falwell covertly paid more than $200,000 to individuals who made damaging allegations about President Clinton's personal conduct, Salon has learned....

Edited April 14, 2012 by Tom Scully