The Death of Bob Loomis: Mockingbird

[James DiEugenio]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/obituaries/robert-loomis-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries&fbclid=IwAR3zIyJNwjXTq_Yg98XajrNE9sLnp23ME2RJNas7jz6ZITOyqYT7pFPwwiQ

Bob Loomis has passed on.  For all the good authors he aided, as the NYT mentions above, he did a world of evil in publishing.

Loomis was a big backer of James Phelan who helped cover up the JFK case more than once. Including a long article in NY Times magazine. He also helped Bill Houghton issue his cover up book on the RFK case, called justifiably, Special Unit Senator.  He was important to the career of Sy Hersh, for instance with his My Lai books, which today have not held up well, since Hersh tried to say My Lai was not a part of Phoenix.  Doug Valentine, who wrote the best book on that operation, says it was.  For obvious reasons, I trust Doug more than Hersh. 

But most of all, it was Loomis and Harry Evans who recruited Posner after the film JFK came out.  They then gave him one of the largest PR tours in the modern history of publishing, matched only by the one given to Hersh four years later for his hatchet job The Dark Side of Camelot. They began that campaign with the two infamous ads in the NY Times on consecutive weekends, labeling people like Stone, Groden and Jim Marrs as "Guilty of Misleading the American Public".  They then answered the charge a week later with the announcement of  "One Man One Gun, Case Closed." 

Recall, the ARRB had not even been set up yet!  There were some 2 million pages of materials that had yet to be declassified, 60,000 documents.  But these two jerks wanted to close down the case, and it was they who were misleading the American public because how could they possibly know what was in those yet to be seen documents.  How could they know that Lou Stokes, former  chair of the HSCA, was going to the ARRB once it was set up and he would tell them: look no one on the HSCA was happy with our medical inquiry.  You should really do an examination.  Which they did and discovered some very interesting stuff.

But what Loomis and Evans wanted to do was to crush any repeat performance of what happened in 1991, so it would not happen in 1993 for the 30th anniversary.   And they did since Posner was the big headliner for the 30th.  This reached all the way down to PBS and Frontline. Where Gus Russo and Scott Malone put together an "Oswald did it" show for producer Mike Sullivan. Posner was on the show, along with Ed Epstein.

The fact that Posner's book was discredited fairly quickly by knowledgeable people was not important.  Loomis and Evans used it as a propaganda vehicle and got in on the cover of US News through Evans' buddy Zuckerman. 

I called Loomis' office in NYC once.  His secretary said he was in Washington two days per week.  For the food?  😀  Any idiot can figure out what he was doing there.

And that is the way the world works.   Good riddance.

Edited April 21, 2020 by James DiEugenio