Gerald Posner on Murder Most Foul

[Jim Phelps]

Posner is a posing.  Because all that backed WC, backed the conspiracy involving lots of higher ups.

As Dylan's verse comes out and Vincent comes alive-----the Poser see bars in their futures.  imho

[David Andrews]

1 hour ago, Ron Ecker said:

Peckinpah didn't know who Dylan was? Well at least he should have noticed, "This guy looks like Billy the Kid."

 

Peckinpah had a 1940s-1950s boho sensibility, and was sort of a universe (of tequila) unto himself.

Edited April 4, 2020 by David Andrews

[Matt Allison]

On 4/2/2020 at 6:38 PM, Robert Burrows said:

Posner's claim that Dylan chose to "commercialize the death of an American president..."  ignores the fact that the song was posted for free.

Yep. And that's about par for the course when it comes to an intellectually dishonest choad like Posner.

[James DiEugenio]

I think many of us have shown that what Dylan wrote was not a hodge podge.

To say that these ideas about Kennedy's assassination have been disproven ignores the work of the ARRB, which did the contrary.

As one Kennedy family member once noted, when you go to the homes of that family, you will see book after book on the shelves about the JFK case.  

I was supposed to debate Posner one night back at the 40th anniversary on a radio station up in Portland.  I was looking forward to it.

He backed out the night before.

 

Edited April 5, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Pamela Brown]

On 4/2/2020 at 6:31 PM, Ron Ecker said:

Posner thinks Dylan should have written "The Ballad of Lee Harvey Oswald" instead. Something like this:

I'm a pro-Castro Commie and I acted alone
Just three shots were fired and I fired on my own
How could I shoot JFK from in front
When I was behind him, it would be quite a stunt.

You get the idea.

 

 

 

That might have worked better with Dylan's Tom Paine Award speech...

[Pamela Brown]

On 4/2/2020 at 6:38 PM, Robert Burrows said:

Posner's claim that Dylan chose to "commercialize the death of an American president..." ignores the fact that the song was posted  for free.

Good point. Maybe he intended to say something like 'get everyone all riled up and talking about the JFK assassination again, as though it were not Case Closed'...how dare he!

[Rob Couteau]

On 4/2/2020 at 8:06 PM, S.T. Patrick said:

He also certainly plugged his own book all over the American media. Did the proceeds go to charity or something or is that "commercializing"?

Excellent point. Reminiscent of this keen observation by author Stanley J Marks, MURDER MOST FOUL!, page 11, question #63: 

"Did any [Warren] Commission write a book on the murder?
     Yes. Congressman Ford with a book that sold for $6.95. He now says that writing about the Commission reveals a 'lack of taste' if these persons attack the Warren Report. It reminds one of the story of the law student, who after five tries, passed the Bar. He's first proposal to the Bar Association was that the qualifications be raised!" 

 

[James DiEugenio]

If you remember back at the almost incredible wave of publicity that Posner's POS book got, it is literally unprecedented in the recent history of book publishing.

Why?  How?

The MSM was looking for a way to counter the tremendous impact of the film JFK.  If one recalls, that film actually caused a debate to open in public.That debate went on for about a year, extending both before and after the film.  For the first time in recent memory, critics of the Commission were getting on mainstream shows, people like the late Phil Melanson and Jim Marrs.  There were actually specials devoted to the possibility of conspiracy.  In prime time!

Bob Loomis was one of the most powerful book editors in the business, located in New York at Random House.  According to Posner, as conveyed to Marrs, Loomis asked Posner to write a book to counter this wave of skepticism.  He even promised him access to Nosenko.  Since Nosenko was in the employ of the CIA, and almost no private author had ever talked to him, this tells you how plugged in Loomis was. When I called his office there was further certification of this.  I asked his secretary if he was in.  She said no he was not.  He spends about two days a week in Washington and that was one of  the two days.  Hmm.  Should I add that another of Loomis' clients was the late  FBI asset and govt suck up, Jim Phelan?

So Posner went to work, and Loomis wanted the book for the 30th anniversary.  This is just when the National Archives is beginning to open its files due to the ARRB. Therefore the overwhelming major source that Posner used for his book was the WC. Which his book was a 700 page recycling of.  To show just how bereft the book was., he actually said that the reason the Tague strike did not have copper is because the copper coating was stripped going through the twigs of the oak tree!  If you have ever seen the WCC ammo you will understand how idiotic that is.

But that did not matter of course.  The guy running Random House at the time was Harold Evans.  Evans is Mr. Anglo/American establishment.  He is married to Tina Brown (Daily Beast, New Yorker, Vanity Fair.). If you recall, these 2 men ran a large two week ad in the NY Times smearing certain critics like Bob Groden, Oliver Stone, Jim Marrs. In part two they trumpeted the coming of Posner, with a slogan something like, one man, one gun, Case Closed. In other words, they were not aware of the controversy even at that time about the rifle, and how on earth the coupon got to Chicago and the money order was in the bank in less than 24 hours.  Or how you could call a book Case Closed when it did not contain a single new file from the ARRB. 

The book was clearly agitprop. But Evans and Loomis were determined for it to saturate the air waves on the 30th.  They were not going to let happen what happened in 1991-92. The republic may not have withstood it.  To arrange the kind of PR tour that Posner got would literally cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is what it takes to hire a top level NY/Washington PR firm and do this kind of work to get a cover story for US News and a slot on ABC in prime time, and that was for starters.

What was surprising was that the book got a lot of publicity but really did not do very well sales wise.  But it did its job which was to confuse the public and spawn a whole new wave of TV specials propping up the Single Bullet Fantasy.

BTW, the only other book I recall of recent vintage that got this kind of build up was Hersh's hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot. In its own way, that book is as bad or worse than Posner's, because it is the second wave of attack on JFK. Should I add that Loomis had been a longtime agent for Hersh?

This is the way the world works.

Edited April 7, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

When I read Epstein's LEGEND at the time it came out -- another

meretricious CIA-backed project, but with more original

research, albeit bent to fit his foreordained conclusions -- I was stunned at how expensive the research

obviously had been and how it had to have been funded

by powerful forces. The Reader's Digest is well-plugged-in to the powers that be.

What a sick joke when Posner accuses Dylan of profiteering

off the assassination, since that is just what Posner did and

Dylan did not do. That charge is Orwellian and straight from the 1967 CIA

memo to media assets. And as those of us who are actual

assassination scholars know, the work is a labor of love

that we largely self-finance, taking a loss, while a few books

that get big advances and promotion because they support

the WC line are published by major publishers.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

Good point Joe.  

Legend had a huge budget for the time period.  Epstein had a whole crew of researchers.  Marrs asked one of them, "Why did you spend all that time trying to link Oswald to the KGB and not any time linking him to the CIA?"  She said, "We were told not to go there."

Again, this is the way America works.

[David Andrews]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

If you remember back at the almost incredible wave of publicity that Posner's POS book got, it is literally unprecedented in the recent history of book publishing.

Why?  How?

The MSM was looking for a way to counter the tremendous impact of the film JFK.  If one recalls, that film actually caused a debate to open in public.That debate went on for about a year, extending both before and after the film.  For the first time in recent memory, critics of the Commission were getting on mainstream shows, people like the late Phil Melanson and Jim Marrs.  There were actually specials devoted to the possibility of conspiracy.  In prime time!

Bob Loomis was one of the most powerful book editors in the business, located in New York at Random House.  According to Posner, as conveyed to Marrs, Loomis asked Posner to write a book to counter this wave of skepticism.  He even promised him access to Nosenko.  Since Nosenko was in the employ of the CIA, and almost no private author had ever talked to him, this tells you how plugged in Loomis was. When I called his office there was further certification of this.  I asked his secretary if he was in.  She said no he was not.  He spends about two days a week in Washington and that was one of  the two days.  Hmm.  Should I add that another of Loomis' clients was the late  FBI asset and govt suck up, Jim Phelan?

So Posner went to work, and Loomis wanted the book for the 30th anniversary.  This is just when the National Archives is beginning to open its files due to the ARRB. Therefore the overwhelming major source that Posner used for his book was the WC. Which his book was a 700 page recycling of.  To show just how bereft the book was., he actually said that the reason the Tague strike did not have copper is because the copper coating was stripped going through the twigs of the oak tree!  If you have ever seen the WCC ammo you will understand how idiotic that is.

But that did not matter of course.  The guy running Random House at the time was Harold Evans.  Evans is Mr. Anglo/American establishment.  He is married to Tina Brown (Daily Beast, New Yorker, Vanity Fair.). If you recall, these 2 men ran a large two week ad in the NY Times smearing certain critics like Bob Groden, Oliver Stone, Jim Marrs. In part two they trumpeted the coming of Posner, with a slogan something like, one man, one gun, Case Closed. In other words, they were not aware of the controversy even at that time about the rifle, and how on earth the coupon got to Chicago and the money order was in the bank in less than 24 hours.  Or how you could call a book Case Closed when it did not contain a single new file from the ARRB. 

The book was clearly agitprop. But Evans and Loomis were determined for it to saturate the air waves on the 30th.  They were not going to let happen what happened in 1991-92. The republic may not have withstood it.  To arrange the kind of PR tour that Posner got would literally cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is what it takes to hire a top level NY/Washington PR firm and do this kind of work to get a cover story for US News and a slot on ABC in prime time, and that was for starters.

What was surprising was that the book got a lot of publicity but really did not do very well sales wise.  But it did its job which was to confuse the public and spawn a whole new wave of TV specials propping up the Single Bullet Fantasy.

BTW, the only other book I recall of recent vintage that got this kind of build up was Hersh's hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot. In its own way, that book is as bad or worse than Posner's, because it is the second wave of attack on JFK. Should I add that Loomis had been a longtime agent for Hersh?

This is the way the world works.

You ought to write this history larger for K&K and stick it to him.  Couldn't Talbot get that on Salon.com for you?

Edited April 7, 2020 by David Andrews

[W. Niederhut]

I think Ron Unz should routinely post James DiEugenio's articles from Kennedys and King at the Unz Review.

Unz seems to be mainly interested in publishing material about "untold history" and the mythology promoted by our U.S. mainstream media-- our "American Pravda," as he calls it.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks so much to both of you.

But from my understanding  Talbot does not have a lot of influence at Salon anymore.

From what I understanding it was sold to the Ny Times.

Unz is an interesting character.  Very cosmopolitan in his thinking for a rich guy.