Sylvia Meagher and Clay Shaw vs Jim Garrison

[Andrew Prutsok]

11 hours ago, Allen Lowe said:

that is absolute nonsense. You think they don't want to do anything? You are just regurgitating what is basically a Fox news line.

I'm just going by what Obama did. Biden was his VP, remember? No public option on healthcare, no banksters or torturers prosecuted or even investigated. "Look forward not back." Biden himself has been saying nothing will fundamentally change when fundamental change is needed now more than ever. He sincerely believes there are reasonable Republicans and they will work with them.

 

Apart from not tweeting and acting like an adderall-addled lunatic most of the time, what is it you think Biden is going to try to change?

[James DiEugenio]

How did this get in a Sylvia Meagher and Clay Shaw vs JIm Garrison thread?

There is a proper thread for this, but not here.

[Anthony Thorne]

I’ll write more about Brandeis in a bit. If you rewind the clock and check the history of both the campus and the department Roche ran, you hit numerous OSS and CIA figures, including one - Herbert Marcuse - that openly wrote anti-Soviet propaganda in the 50’s for the CIA, and another - William L. Langer, Marcuse’s boss in the OSS - who worked to cultivate ties between the CIA and universities. Langer left the OSS, set up the Russian Institute at Columbia University, and gave Marcuse a fat scholarship to write a book on Soviet Marxism. Langer - who sat alongside Allen Dulles on various committees during and after the war - was running the Office of National Estimates at the CIA while Marcuse was writing his thesis. When Marcuse finished, he headed off to Brandeis, thanked Langer in the introduction to his book, and helped set up the department that Roche later ran. In the late 60’s, Marcuse had to cancel a European speaking tour when a German journalist accused him in an article of working for the CIA. By my count, around five or six guys from the OSS ended up teaching at Brandeis, which was set up a couple of years after the war. I Googled the background of one of the other OSS-to-Brandeis guys, and read that he was eventually put in charge of psychological warfare operations in Vietnam. These guys were presumably just a small part of Brandeis, which has been running successfully for more than seventy years, but you can kind of see how Jacob Cohen would have been welcome to join that department, spend fifty years out of the seventy attacking JFK assassination researchers, and teach a class saying that conspiracy theories about JFK’s murder were rubbish. Side note - Marcuse, who founded that department where Roche and Cohen later worked together, pops up in a reprinted article from the 70’s in Dick Russell’s recent book on the case. He drops by to visit another JFK assassination author, derides the guy’s theories, and then gives the guy a buck when he leaves to jokingly subscribe to his newsletter. 

Roche, both during and after his time at Brandeis, was a fanatical anti-communist and penned dozens of articles through the late 60’s and early 70’s defending the war. In the latter part of the 70’s, Roche wrote an article attacking JFK assassination researchers. A couple of months afterwards, Moyers produced a documentary interviewing CIA folk and anti-Castro Cubans, and used that documentary to push the ‘Castro did it’ theory. Roche then wrote another article, a weird one, like many of his pieces around then, stating that people shouldn’t watch the documentary as anything detailing the activities of the CIA was usually a big yawn. If so, why mention the documentary, John? Not long after this, Roche joined the Committee on the Present Danger and started writing articles for an obscure neocon/military publication, alongside contributors such as Richard Perle. Roche was a diverting writer with a witty turn of phrase, but as you scroll through his pieces chronologically, you begin to feel like you’re dealing with the academic version of Curtis LeMay.

Roche assisted Moyers during LBJ’s 1964 campaign against Goldwater - that’s the campaign where Moyers was later accused of using the FBI to engage in dirty tricks spying - and a memo from that era shows Roche passing letters to Moyers that Moyers would eventually pass on to the President. A resignation of a key advisor years later allowed Roche to take that advisor’s place and join the discussion and decision making process on the running of the Vietnam war. At one point, Roche is both sending LBJ letters on war strategy, and also writing the speeches that LBJ was delivering about the war in public. One LBJ biography I found implied that Roche was the key guy in government devising a response when Manchester’s DEATH OF A PRESIDENT caused ripples, and when Richard Russell had also made some comments that the government found unhelpful. A sub-chapter of Lance deHaven-Smith’s CONSPIRACY THEORY IN AMERICA discusses how Roche quickly inserted himself into the process of defending the Warren Commission and attacking ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the media. I’ll say more about Epstein in a future post as well, as the nature and background of his advisors at Harvard is now a bit clearer. 

Edited November 7, 2020 by Anthony Thorne

[James DiEugenio]

Very informative Anthony. 

I wonder is it just a coincidence then that future Neocon, the man who singlehandedly wrecked The  New Republic, Martin Peretz,  graduated from Brandeis.  He probably knew Roche.

Peretz had a serious disagreement with JFK over the issue of the Palestinian right of return.  In fact he devised a counter to it for Golda Meir.  And we all know what Peretz did to the New Republic once he took it over.He had neocon Midge Decter do a laudatory review of that the Collier/'Horowitz POS book The Kennedys.  That merited a cover story.

Edited November 7, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Anthony Thorne]

Roche joined Brandeis in 1956 as a Professor (Politics), and moved up to become Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1958. Peretz graduated from Brandeis in 1959. So it’s quite likely that they would have crossed paths to some degree.

Later in the week I’ll do a more detailed post with links that fills in the gaps, and add the Epstein stuff I found. There’s a few more wrinkles to the story but it all leans in the direction I’ve been indicating over the past few posts.

[Anthony Thorne]

Here we go. Peretz mentions that he knew Roche at Brandeis in this article.

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/N Disk/New Republic The/Item 01.pdf
 

He also mentions how he became close to Max Lerner. Lerner was another Brandeis figure who was previously in the OSS.

[Allen Lowe]

On 11/6/2020 at 10:22 AM, Andrew Prutsok said:

I'm just going by what Obama did. Biden was his VP, remember? No public option on healthcare, no banksters or torturers prosecuted or even investigated. "Look forward not back." Biden himself has been saying nothing will fundamentally change when fundamental change is needed now more than ever. He sincerely believes there are reasonable Republicans and they will work with them.

 

Apart from not tweeting and acting like an adderall-addled lunatic most of the time, what is it you think Biden is going to try to change?

sorry Jim, will let this ride.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Allen Lowe

[James DiEugenio]

So, the plot thickens.  Thanks Anthony.

See, I always wondered why The New Republic was not just anti conspiracy--Ron Rosenbaum was their guy on that beat--but also seemingly anti-Kennedy.  That Midge Decter cover story for the hatchet job Collier/Horowtiz book.

In doing my study of JFK's foreign policy i discovered that Kennedy was pushing the UN/ Joseph Johnson plan which included a Palestinian right of return. What this meant was that the Palestinian refugees of the Nakba would have a triple option: they could stay where they were, move somewhere else, or return to their original homes.  The UN would pay for the last two, largely reimbursed by the USA.  Kennedy pushed this through his Israeli ambassador in direct meetings with Ben Gurion and Meir. Even after Ben Gurion instructed it be turned down at the UN.

It turned out that the Israelis then devised a counter to this, namely that the Palestinians should be moved to Jordan, not back to Israel.  Do you know who helped devise this plan and was instrumental in propagating it? Martin Peretz.

What makes that even more interesting is this. In the period of 1967-68, when there was a battle going on in the media over the JFK case, Ray Marcus was trying to recruit prominent academics to advocate for our side.  One of the guys he tried to talk to was Peretz, who was then an assistant professor, I think at Harvard or Brandeis.  Peretz gave Marcus the back of his hand, saying words to the effect: I hated the SOB, meaning Kennedy. I never understood that rather categorical denial, until several months ago.  When Malcolm Blunt sent me the cables and letters on this issue from the JFK Library.

We all know what happened with Perez and The New Republic.  He took a once stalwart liberal paragon of journalism and slowly but surely turned it into--and there is no other way to say this--a neocon outpost.  He ended up backing the disastrous 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which killed about 15,000 civilians, and culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. He even backed the Contras!  To the point that TNR became a launchpad for the likes of Fred Barnes and Krauthammer. Even when his wife told him that Stephen Glass was making up stories, he failed to act and then blamed the dozens of Glass BS stories on his editors and fired them both.

After the Florida heist of 2000, followed by 9-11, that was a perfect opportunity to expand circulation.  It was The Nation that did that, doubling their readership.  TNR continued to shrink. To the point that it became a vagabond journal passed around several times in the last decade with no real identity or owner.  Peretz today lives in Tel Aviv.

Keep it coming Anthony.

Edited November 11, 2020 by James DiEugenio