JFK vs. CIA

[Gil Jesus]

Arthur Krock's editorial that "if the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government, it will come from the CIA." Narrated by Greg Burnham and Mark Lane.

 

 

[Denny Zartman]

And, as has been pointed out recently, everything surrounding JFK and the production of "Seven Days In May" is fraught with meaning.

[Paul Rigby]

Gil, 

Read the Krock piece again - it's an extended defence of the CIA, and an attack on both Richard Starnes, from whose "Arrogant CIA" dispatch Krock quotes so extensively, and JFK, for permitting public criticism of the Agency.

I lost a deal of work on Krock, and much else besides, following a computer crash, so what follows is merely a surviving rough draft outlining his career-long service to the Allen Dulles wing of the US elite. 

NYT’s Arthur Krock as CIA mouthpiece

The NYT’s Arthur Krock, the Princeton-educated doyen - by virtue of his stint as the NYT's Washington bureau chief (1931-1953) (1), then resident senior commentator (1953-1966) (2) – of capitol correspondents is often depicted as a Kennedy family intimate in general, and a loyal friend of President Kennedy in particular. The later is a half-truth designed to hide an inconvenient fact. For while Krock did contribute a foreword to JFK’s Why England Slept, and was the book’s dedicatee, there were profound disagreements between the journalist and the politician, disagreements that widened as the Kennedy presidency unfolded.  At their root lay politics. Krock was a hard-line economic and racial conservative. As late as 1968, he continued to insist, quite surreally, that union power ruled “supreme over the economy”(3); and that the Department of Justice under Kennedy and Johnson had “spinelessly established the fact of being a Negro as a grant of immunity”(4). He was also American journalism’s most devoted servant of the CIA and both its forerunners, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Central Intelligence Group (CIG).

Krock’s career of lying in the service of power and wealth began in earnest in the pages of the New York World. Taking his cue from the paper’s star reporter, Edward Bayard Swope, Krock used his op. ed. contributions to burnish the reputation of Bernard Baruch, the financier and serial political eminence grise, in return for lucrative stock market tips. He simultaneously supplemented his income by serving as what he himself termed a “private counsel” on “public relations” to the banking firm of Dillon, Reid. It was for leaking details of “an editorial likely to effect the price” of certain Dillon, Reid stocks that the paper’s editor, Walter Lippmann, in one of his career-defining fits of selective indignation, barred Krock from further contributions to the editorial pages. As a token of its enduring commitment to the highest levels of journalistic integrity, the New York Times responded by hiring, then swiftly promoting, the offending Krock (5).

By the 1930s, Krock was a zealous isolationist with a hands-off approach to European fascism. In 1935, according to Krock, FDR wrote to the NYT’s publisher urging Krock’s dismissal (6). Krock’s memoir makes this action appear capricious and unwarranted. FDR was prescient. A Krock column of May 1937 sought to pressure the President into removing William Dodds, the determinedly anti-Hitler US Ambassador to Berlin, with a figure more congenial to both Hitler and his backers within the US elite (7). A year later, a Krock column sought to scupper the attempt to repeal the US embargo on aid to the democratically elected Spanish Republican government (8). In August 1940, he tried “to turn Wilkie from co-operation with Roosevelt on the question of releasing destroyers to Britain,” citing “Roosevelt’s failure to co-operate with Hoover in the critical months between Roosevelt’s election and inauguration” (9). Krock’s gift for the apposite and timely analogy, be it historical, constitutional, or merely moral, was a recurring characteristic of his journalism.

Krock did not come under sustained attack from the massive covert propaganda effort undertaken by British intelligence against US isolationism in the years 1940-41 for the very good reason that the journalist, like the faction within the US elite for whom he was such a dutiful mouthpiece, was too powerful to offend. That faction was, in any case, ready to move. By late September 1941, Krock was noting, with well-concealed dismay, the collapse of solidarity among the Congressional advocates of continued isolationism, a change effected in part by a British intelligence-concocted opinion poll which appeared to show a dramatic shift in attitudes among delegates to the American Legion convention of earlier that same month(10).

Krock’s championship of the modern “external” US intelligence community began with an October 1941 puff piece in support of William Donovan’s disinterested call for a presidential war room. The latter was to function as the focal point of, and clearing house for, intelligence supplied by men like…William Donovan, the Wall Street lawyer who became the OSS’s first and only head (11). With the war’s end, FDR ordered the winding up of the OSS (12). He was not alone in his fears. A prescient Republican Senator, Edward V. Robertson (Wyoming), argued - when opposing the National Security bill – that the resultant bureaucracy would become “an American Gestapo,” and create “a vast military empire” (13). Truman initially endorsed his predecessor’s verdict (14), but was soon to discover that the presidential writ runs only where real power permits.

In the summer and autumn of 1945, the OSS fought tooth and nail the decision to fold of successive US Presidents. As Donovan’s assistant, Robert H. Alcorn, later revealed, his boss had no intention of seeing his creation abolished (15). In the classic manner of the spook bureaucracy, this campaign was waged by simultaneous suppression and propaganda. As a CIA propagandist observed: “Propaganda thrives best if there are no competing expressions of opinion to disturb the audience” (16). Thus Drew Pearson’s critical swipe at the class composition of the OSS, and the effect its ruling Wall Street claque had in determining policy toward occupied Germany, contained in a despatch filed from San Francisco on 27 April 1945, gained a public airing not thanks to the Bell Syndicate, his customary distributors, but Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who read it into the Congressional Record (17).

At the same time as it suppressed criticism, the OSS selectively declassified its own files, and spoon-fed them to tame hacks (18). Among the group charged with either spicing up the sanitised boys own adventure stories fed them, or else drawing the correct conclusions from same, was, inevitably, Krock.  In July, he lamented the ingratitude shown the OSS for its war-time heroics (19). In August, he argued that America’s newly-won global dominance merited nothing less than “an active intelligence looking to the outside world,” not least to prevent the repetition of “pre-war mistakes” (20).

Two months later, he memorialised OSS Colonel Peter Dewey, “the first American to die in Vietnam” (albeit only until the early 1960s, when the next first American to die on active service in Vietnam did so). The paragon Dewey, NYT readers learned, was “shot from ambush” by ungrateful natives who had mistaken him for a French officer, and thus unwittingly deprived themselves of an anti-colonialist liberator (21). Vast numbers of the great unwashed, not only in Vietnam, were of course to persist in this absurd error for many decades to come. The victory of those campaigning for a vast “external” intelligence bureaucracy saw the formation of, first, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), then the CIA. With Truman’s change of heart came approval. In July 1946, Krock praised Truman as the best-briefed President ever, one who would not repeat the mistakes of Roosevelt in making too many concessions to the Russians because, thanks to the existence of the CIG, he would be much better informed (22).

The CIA’s overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala in 1954 saw Krock welcoming the defeat of “the world Bolshevik conspiracy to take over the country” and the advent of a military junta, albeit only “until there can be free and democratic elections again.” Precisely how and when that happy state was to be achieved were subjects that did not obsess Krock. He denied any US involvement, and thought America, the serial invader of Central American countries, had been slow to respond to burgeoning Moscow-directed intervention in the region (23).

Aware of the U-2 flights over the USSR “long before they became public knowledge” (24), Krock whitewashed the CIA’s role in arming and financing Fidel Castro (25), and later censored the key phrase of Eisenhower’s ominous farewell address to the nation as President (from the actual “military-industrial complex” to the more ideologically acceptable “industry-government spending combination” (26)).

 The less public face of Krock’s role as elite insider saw repeated service as messenger and intermediary. As early as January 1933, Krock conveyed a message from Herbert Hoover to his successor, FDR, on the subject of independence for the Philippines (27). That role endured, as was strikingly illustrated by his involvement in the startling revelation of Eisenhower’s last head of the Atomic Energy Commission - and that revelation’s part in the cover-up of the supply by the Pentagon and the Agency of atomic weaponry to Israel.

In December 1960, an Arabic-language broadcast from Moscow insisted that Israel had recently taken receipt of a ready-made atomic bomb, courtesy of the United States. The claim drew the tacit endorsement of The Times, which noted in its comment on the broadcast that a cover-story was already in motion: “Surprised indignation about the idea of a Franco-Israel bomb seemed a more effective response than a mere denial” (28). In fact, de Gaulle had severed all such co-operation upon his return to power in 1958 (29).

The cover-story took wing in the NYT of 19 December 1960, courtesy of reporter John Finney, who had been steered in the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission head by Arthur Krock (30). Within days of the interview’s emergence, the AEC chief, the cover story launched, announced his resignation on NBC’s Meet The Press. John A. McCone was to replace Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence only after a fierce and neglected power struggle, one that saw the unexplained displacement of Kennedy’s first choice, Fowler Hamilton, who had spent months at Langley preparing for the role (31).

Krock’s opposition to Kennedy’s policies – from the Congo to Alabama – led to some of the most hypocritical attacks launched by an American journalist on a President. In February 1963, he joined in the attack on the Kennedy administration’s news manipulation: “A news management policy not only exists but in the form of direct and deliberate actions has been enforced more cynically and more boldly than by any other previous Administration…One principal form that it takes is social flattery of Washington reporters and commentators – many more than ever got this treatment in the past – by the President and his high-level supporters” (32). As a right-wing English journalist noted, “Arthur Krock had a grouch, no doubt, since he was not among those who were being flattered.” (33). Krock’s hypocrisy was complete and unabashed. This was the same  journalist, of course, who had participated in the OSS campaign against Truman in 1946, and who worked for the newspaper that denounced and censored Bertrand Russell’s claims that the US was using napalm and defoliants in Vietnam in 1963 (34). 

(1) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 92. 

(2)  Ibid., p. 78. 

(3) Ibid. p. 278. 

(4) Ibid., p.277. 

(5) Ronald Steel. Walter Lippmann and the American Century (NY: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 200-201. In his Memoirs (p. 63), Krock dates his joining the NYT to 1 May 1927. 

(6) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 182. 

(7) Arnold A. Offner. American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (NY: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1976), p. 205. NYT, 5 May 1938.

(8) Ibid., p. 159. NYT, 14 May 1937. 

(9) Mark Lincoln Chadwin. The Warhawks: American Interventionists before Pearl Harbor (NY: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1970), pp. 94-95. NYT, 1 August 1940. 

(10) Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Washington: Brasseys, 1998), p. 96. Krock’s NYT column of 21 September 1941. 

(11) John Ranelagh. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London: Sceptre, 1988), p. 60. See the NYT, 8 October 1941. 

(12) 

(13) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, (Vol. 12, No. 1), p. 29. 

(14) “[F]ollowing the Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945, Truman ordered the disbanding of the OSS as of 1 October of that year.” (Athan G. Theoharis & John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (London: Harrap Books, 1989), p. 190.) 

(15) Richard J. Barnet. Roots of War: The Men and the Institutions behind US Foreign Policy (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 32. 

(16) Thomas E. Mahl. Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (Washington: Brasseys, 1998), p. ? 

(17) George Seldes. The People Don’t Know: The American Press and the Cold War (NY: Gaer Associates, 1949), pp.324-325: “The OSS…has, strangely [sic], distributed some of the most powerful bankers representatives in the United States at key points where they can influence U.S. policy in occupied Germany. The roster of OSS men who have been or are operating in Europe reads like a bluestocking list of the first 60 families…” 

(18) William R. Corson. The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Community (NY: The Dial Press/James Wade Books, 1977), p. 244. The other named journalistic servants of the OSS were: Joseph Loftus (“Secret Thai Role in War Detailed,” NYT, 9 September 1945, p.20), Bess Furman, and Tillman Durdin (“US ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Exploits and Secret Blows in China Bared,” New York Times, 14 September 1945, p.1). 

(19) R. Harris Smith. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1972), p. 424, citing Krock’s “OSS Gets It Coming And Going,” New York Times, 31 July 1945. 

(20) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, (Vol. 12, No. 1), p. 23. See also the same author’s The CIA and American Democracy (Yale UP, 1989), p. 37. The Krock column in question appeared in the NYT on 16 July, 1946. 

(21) Noam Chomsky. Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 164. Krock in the NYT, 29 June 1954. 

(22) Arthur Krock. Memoirs: Intimate Recollections of Twelve American Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1970), p. 181. 

(23) Ibid., pp. 275-6. Krock pointed the finger at the State Department. The later was unquestionably used for cover by the Agency, but was most definitely not the driving force behind the policy. To hide the CIA’s role, Krock cites the penultimate US Ambassador to Cuba, Arthur Gardner, but not the last, Earl T. Smith, who attested to the CIA’s backing for Castro before a Senate Sub-committee in late August 1960. 

(24) Ibid., p. 276. The effect is eerily echoed in the shifting variants employed by President Bush on the subject of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” Orwellian right-speak, no less. 

(25) Ibid., p. 128-129. 

(26) “Israel Fails to Allay U.S. Anxiety,” The Times, 21 December 1960, p. 6. Time, for example, the ever-faithful mouthpiece of the military-industrial complex, was eagerly running the cover-story. See “The Atom,” 26 December 1960, p. 11. 

(27) Bernard Ledwidge. De Gaulle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 304. 

(28) Seymour Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p.71. 

(29) 

(30) 

(31) Helen Fuller. Year of Trial: Kennedy’s Crucial Decisions (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 271: “A New York lawyer, Fowler Hamilton, with considerable experience behind him, had been brought to Washington and installed at the CIA with the general expectation that he would succeed Allen Dulles…” 

AP, "Retirement of CIA Chief Announced," Washington Post, 1 August 1961, p.A2: Salinger yesterday announced retirement of Allen Dulles, claiming retirement in November 1961 had been Dulles' intention when accepted JFK's offer to stay on. Salinger declined to answer questions concerning Fowler Hamilton. Hamilton, according to forthcoming issue of Newsweek (August 7), due to succeed Dulles in October "after several months of working with Dulles". 

CIA propagandist Victor Lasky sought to mask Hamilton’s displacement with a red herring candidate: “The Liberals had hoped that CIA would be given to one of their own…there had been pressure on Kennedy to appoint someone like New York attorney Telford Taylor…,” JFK: The Man and the Myth (NY: Dell, 1977), p. 672. 

Of Kennedy’s inner circle, Sorensen comes closest to the truth about the appointment of Dulles’s successor. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, with characteristic dishonesty, merely that Hamilton “had been under consideration,” A Thousand Days, p. 518. 

(32) Henry Fairlie, “Camelot Revisited: The bright promises that led to bloodshed and despair,” Harper’s, January 1973, p. 73. 

(33) Wayne H. Nielsen, “The Second Indo-China War and the American Press,” The Minority of One, October 1964, p. 11.

 

 

 

 

[Paul Brancato]

Thanks Mr. Rigby. I’m no expert on this subject - much of it new news for me. I believe I had read Krock’s warning about CIA and JFK. 
I’m hoping others will read and comment.

[Joseph McBride]

Comments on Arthur Krock from my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

[New York] Times columnist Arthur Krock, ignoring the concerns he expressed in October 1963 about a possible CIA coup in the works to overthrow the government, wrote in his 1964 column on the Report, “If there ever is to be a more definitive history of the tragedy at Dallas in November 1963 than the report of the Warren Commission, it will have to be supplied by psychiatrists.” Although accepting the finding that Oswald was the lone assassin, Krock admitted that the questions of motive for both Oswald and Ruby remained “unanswered.” This led Krock to the illogical conclusion, “The opportunity to establish one died with Oswald, and Ruby’s is as yet only slightly less speculative. In view of the insuperable obstacles to history, the report of the Warren Commission is even more remarkable an achievement.” Helping establish a template for many future commentators on the case to be evasive about it, Krock thereby took refuge in what he called the supposed “Unsolved Mysteries of Motive” rather than showing any sustained interest in the political causes of the assassination. . . .

 

The concerns expressed by Kennedy about the possibility of a military coup had been shared by the influential New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a longtime confidant of Joseph Kennedy who had helped JFK revise his 1940 book Why England Slept but had often been at odds with the president over policy. JFK let his dissatisfaction slip in 1961 when George Tames of the Times took his iconic photograph of the president leaning over a table at a window in the Oval Office in silhouette between two flags, seemingly burdened by what Jacqueline Kennedy called “the awful weight of the presidency.” Tames remembered that Kennedy had been unaware the photo was being taken as he looked at the editorial page of the Times. When he glanced over at the photographer after it was shot, Kennedy said to him, “I wonder where Mr. Krock gets all the crap he puts in this horseshit column of his." . . .

 

Speaking with [Theodore] White on November 29, [1963,] Jacqueline [Kennedy] had it in her mind to draw a parallel between her late husband’s administration and the court of King Arthur. She meant it to have heroic and mythic overtones but perhaps also was subconsciously evoking the Arthurian atmosphere of treachery and adultery. She spoke of the Broadway musical Camelot, which she said they had both loved, and while recalling the events of the assassination in fragmentary fashion, she tried to elevate her husband’s legacy by quoting and italicizing the lines, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” The more skeptical president probably would have winced at that dubious and corny analogy, which has been endlessly overused through the years. White wrote in his 1978 memoir, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, “Quite inadvertently, I was her instrument in labeling the myth. . . . Whether this is myth or truth I still debate.”

“What bothered her was history,” White recalled. “. . . She wanted me to rescue Jack from all these ‘bitter people’ who were going to write about him in history [she had mentioned Arthur Krock and Merriman Smith]. She did not want Jack left to the historians. . . .  [I]n the most lucid possible manner, she was making a plea that was both unreal and unnecessary. She had asked me to Hyannisport, she said, because she wanted me to make certain that Jack was not forgotten in history. The thought that it was up to me to make American history remember John F. Kennedy was so unanticipated that my pencil stuttered over the notes. . . . What she was saying to me now was: Please, History, be kind to John F. Kennedy.” The sympathetic but clear-minded reporter could not help recognizing that the Camelot myth she was purveying was “a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed. Instead, there began in Kennedy’s time an effort of government to bring reason to bear on facts which were becoming almost too complicated for human minds to grasp. . . . I would never again, after Kennedy, see any man as a hero. A passage of my own life had closed with a passage in American politics.”

Edited January 2, 2023 by Joseph McBride

[Joe Bauer]

There was something clearly heroic in JFK.

Theodore White didn't have to write a "myth" that wasn't true.

Like Lincoln, JFK took a bullet to the brain for what he believed in regards trying to steer the American ideal back towards it's constitutional democracy equal rights roots. 

Taking it back from the wealth corrupted powers to be ( Eisenhower's MIC Complex? )  who had been guiding it's course more for their self-interests than our Constitution/ Bill Of Rights common good one imo.

JFK's American University speech was one of the most profoundly heroic speeches any American President ever made.

What would any great historic leader have to do in their lifetime to qualify as a hero to White?

Was JFK flawed? Ha, of course. What human history hero wasn't? He was an extra-marital affair sex addict.

Yet, his courage to stand up for and brutally die young for humanitarian common good rights and values in the face of deadly dangerous secret adversaries really did make him a true knight in Camelot imo.

 

 

 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[Paul Brancato]

2 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

Comments on Arthur Krock from my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

[New York] Times columnist Arthur Krock, ignoring the concerns he expressed in October 1963 about a possible CIA coup in the works to overthrow the government, wrote in his 1964 column on the Report, “If there ever is to be a more definitive history of the tragedy at Dallas in November 1963 than the report of the Warren Commission, it will have to be supplied by psychiatrists.” Although accepting the finding that Oswald was the lone assassin, Krock admitted that the questions of motive for both Oswald and Ruby remained “unanswered.” This led Krock to the illogical conclusion, “The opportunity to establish one died with Oswald, and Ruby’s is as yet only slightly less speculative. In view of the insuperable obstacles to history, the report of the Warren Commission is even more remarkable an achievement.” Helping establish a template for many future commentators on the case to be evasive about it, Krock thereby took refuge in what he called the supposed “Unsolved Mysteries of Motive” rather than showing any sustained interest in the political causes of the assassination. . . .

 

The concerns expressed by Kennedy about the possibility of a military coup had been shared by the influential New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a longtime confidant of Joseph Kennedy who had helped JFK revise his 1940 book Why England Slept but had often been at odds with the president over policy. JFK let his dissatisfaction slip in 1961 when George Tames of the Times took his iconic photograph of the president leaning over a table at a window in the Oval Office in silhouette between two flags, seemingly burdened by what Jacqueline Kennedy called “the awful weight of the presidency.” Tames remembered that Kennedy had been unaware the photo was being taken as he looked at the editorial page of the Times. When he glanced over at the photographer after it was shot, Kennedy said to him, “I wonder where Mr. Krock gets all the crap he puts in this horseshit column of his." . . .

 

Speaking with [Theodore] White on November 29, [1963,] Jacqueline [Kennedy] had it in her mind to draw a parallel between her late husband’s administration and the court of King Arthur. She meant it to have heroic and mythic overtones but perhaps also was subconsciously evoking the Arthurian atmosphere of treachery and adultery. She spoke of the Broadway musical Camelot, which she said they had both loved, and while recalling the events of the assassination in fragmentary fashion, she tried to elevate her husband’s legacy by quoting and italicizing the lines, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” The more skeptical president probably would have winced at that dubious and corny analogy, which has been endlessly overused through the years. White wrote in his 1978 memoir, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, “Quite inadvertently, I was her instrument in labeling the myth. . . . Whether this is myth or truth I still debate.”

“What bothered her was history,” White recalled. “. . . She wanted me to rescue Jack from all these ‘bitter people’ who were going to write about him in history [she had mentioned Arthur Krock and Merriman Smith]. She did not want Jack left to the historians. . . .  [I]n the most lucid possible manner, she was making a plea that was both unreal and unnecessary. She had asked me to Hyannisport, she said, because she wanted me to make certain that Jack was not forgotten in history. The thought that it was up to me to make American history remember John F. Kennedy was so unanticipated that my pencil stuttered over the notes. . . . What she was saying to me now was: Please, History, be kind to John F. Kennedy.” The sympathetic but clear-minded reporter could not help recognizing that the Camelot myth she was purveying was “a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed. Instead, there began in Kennedy’s time an effort of government to bring reason to bear on facts which were becoming almost too complicated for human minds to grasp. . . . I would never again, after Kennedy, see any man as a hero. A passage of my own life had closed with a passage in American politics.”

As Joe points out, a curious ending to White’s comments. Even more, I feel it is a tragic loss not to have everything Jackie wrote and felt in the public record. 

[Guest]

Great clip - Thanks for sharing. 

[James DiEugenio]

I went over this with Paul long ago.

he is correct.  The Starnes piece is the real thing.

The Krock piece tries to walk it back.

Paul did a lot of good work on this.

 

[Anthony Thorne]

Good piece from Paul above. Krock comes up repeatedly in the CIA Crest database, writing to the CIA, communicating with heads of the CIA, writing to Dulles, getting a letter back from Dulles, and on and on and on. Krock also joined CSIS, the hawkish-spook filled think tank that has stunk up the American political landscape for over half a century, and sat on the advisory board alongside Gerald Ford. Ford was one of the more benign members of the group.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01495R000200010012-9.pdf

Side note, I bought a copy of the James Allen Smith CSIS history STRATEGIC CALLING a year ago as it has detail unavailable anywhere else, and found it had been signed by CSIS founder David Abshire, the guy who started the whole thing with Arleigh Burke.

 

[Joseph McBride]

Theodore White's uncut notes of the Jacqueline Kennedy interview

have been released and are online. They are fascinating to read.

The interview was sanitized at the time, and the LIFE editors

looked askance at her sentimental CAMELOT analogy. But such

was her power and such was the climate then, and

they were holding the issue on deadline, so they gave

in and let her include it. But her interviews

with William Manchester are among the JFK assassination

records that are still hidden from the public and probably

will be when most of us are long gone. The recently

published book of some of her musings is often

quite surprising (including harshly

negative remarks about Dr. King). Caroline Kennedy has not done the

public a service in withholding some of her mother's

thoughts but releasing only selections. Jacqueline

was a complex and well-read person whose reflections

are important to history.

Ricky Leacock, the celebrated

documentarian who helped make PRIMARY (which I 

am in as a Kennedy volunteer, part of the crowd

at the climactic Milwaukee rally, firing off my

flash camera and singing along with the crowd

to his campaign song, a version of "High Hopes") told

me it was obvious she hated campaigning. She would

sit off to the side at events and read Proust or the

Memoirs of Saint-Simon in the original French. When Leacock asked her how she

felt about campaigning, she said, "Have you ever

tried to smile a thousand times a day?"

At that big rally on April 3 in PRIMARY, I had no problem getting JFK to

sign a "Hello, My Name Is" tag -- and my wrist --

but Mrs. Kennedy balked at my request for her

to sign the nametag. She kept saying "No, no, no"

in that whispery voice, and I kept bugging her until

one of her husband's aides said, "Oh, for Christ's

sake, Jackie, give the kid your autograph." She

signed; I learned it was rare for both of them

to sign the same document, and such examples

were going for $100,000 even in the 1960s. Mine

was lost when we had a house fire in 1962. My

mother made me wash my wrist a week after

JFK signed it. But I still have my May 9, 1960, letter from Senator Kennedy

thanking me for my work on the campaign. It's

my most prized possession.

Edited January 3, 2023 by Joseph McBride

[Denny Zartman]

6 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

Theodore White's uncut notes of the Jacqueline Kennedy interview

have been released and are online. They are fascinating to read.

The interview was sanitized at the time, and the LIFE editors

looked askance at her sentimental CAMELOT analogy. But such

was her power and such was the climate then, and

they were holding the issue on deadline, so they gave

in and let her include it. But her interviews

with William Manchester are among the JFK assassination

records that are still hidden from the public and probably

will be when most of us are long gone. The recently

published book of some of her musings is often

quite surprising (including harshly

negative remarks about Dr. King). Caroline Kennedy has not done the

public a service in withholding some of her mother's

thoughts but releasing only selections. Jacqueline

was a complex and well-read person whose reflections

are important to history.

Ricky Leacock, the celebrated

documentarian who helped make PRIMARY (which I 

am in as a Kennedy volunteer, part of the crowd

at the climactic Milwaukee rally, firing off my

flash camera and singing along with the crowd

to his campaign song, a version of "High Hopes") told

me it was obvious she hated campaigning. She would

sit off to the side at events and read Proust or the

Memoirs of Saint-Simon in the original French. When Leacock asked her how she

felt about campaigning, she said, "Have you ever

tried to smile a thousand times a day?"

At that big rally on April 3 in PRIMARY, I had no problem getting JFK to

sign a "Hello, My Name Is" tag -- and my wrist --

but Mrs. Kennedy balked at my request for her

to sign the nametag. She kept saying "No, no, no"

in that whispery voice, and I kept bugging her until

one of her husband's aides said, "Oh, for Christ's

sake, Jackie, give the kid your autograph." She

signed; I learned it was rare for both of them

to sign the same document, and such examples

were going for $100,000 even in the 1960s. Mine

was lost when we had a house fire in 1962. My

mother made me wash my wrist a week after

JFK signed it. But I still have my May 9, 1960, letter from Senator Kennedy

thanking me for my work on the campaign. It's

my most prized possession.

Those are really amazing stories. We're privileged to have you share them with us. Thanks much.

[Ron Bulman]

The first gift my wife ever gave me, before we were married, for Christmas 1989 was the Brown, Little book Life in Camelot which came out for the 25th anniversary in 1988.  12 X 9 inches, 319 pages.

I treasure it not only as a first gift from my wife, she was already aware of my interest in the Kennedy's and JFK's assassination, but for the pictures.   Over 500 of them, 100 in color, 150 never seen before.  Life photographers were given greater access to the president and his family than any in history up to that time.

Starting in 1937 with the whole Joe and Rose family, "Nine Kids and Nine Million Dollars".  The fourth picture in is of Joe Sr. being visited by Henry and Claire Booth Luce on the French Riviera in 1956.  Then Jack and Jackie with them at the opening of the new Time & Life building in 1959.  I've come to realize the Luce's did not share many of his views especially once he became president.

The text is interesting and revealing in spots though generally the official story (of course regarding the assassination).  But, once again the pictures are outstanding and tell the story, so many that I've never seen anywhere else to this day.  From The Wedding and before to The Making of a Queen and King, the Coronation, Good Times to Camelot Bad Moments, Assassination, Saying Goodbye.  Some of the funeral pictures especially still move me, a full page color of Jackie with Caroline and John Jr observing the parade pass where the sadness in her face is painful to see. 

It ends with a page and a half epilogue by Theodore H. White in which Jackie mentions Camelot three times in his interview of her, one in the context of JFK enjoying the recorded title song many times.  With which White ends.  For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.

It leaves me believing JFK enjoyed overall and was proud of his thousand days, and more.

If anyone should wish to see for yourself, it's still available for as little as $1.55 plus 4-5 dollars shipping.  I can't understand why a paperback version is significantly higher than the hardback.

Life in Camelot: The Kennedy Years: Kunhardt, Philip: 9780316210898: Amazon.com: Books 

Edited January 4, 2023 by Ron Bulman

[Joe Bauer]

1. LARRY KING'S INTERVIEW WITH MARK LANE …

    
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8zqsC6PrLo

   

    

   36:2

[Ron Bulman]

On 1/3/2023 at 7:42 PM, Ron Bulman said:

The first gift my wife ever gave me, before we were married, for Christmas 1989 was the Brown, Little book Life in Camelot which came out for the 25th anniversary in 1988.  12 X 9 inches, 319 pages.

I treasure it not only as a first gift from my wife, she was already aware of my interest in the Kennedy's and JFK's assassination, but for the pictures.   Over 500 of them, 100 in color, 150 never seen before.  Life photographers were given greater access to the president and his family than any in history up to that time.

Starting in 1937 with the whole Joe and Rose family, "Nine Kids and Nine Million Dollars".  The fourth picture in is of Joe Sr. being visited by Henry and Claire Booth Luce on the French Riviera in 1956.  Then Jack and Jackie with them at the opening of the new Time & Life building in 1959.  I've come to realize the Luce's did not share many of his views especially once he became president.

The text is interesting and revealing in spots though generally the official story (of course regarding the assassination).  But, once again the pictures are outstanding and tell the story, so many that I've never seen anywhere else to this day.  From The Wedding and before to The Making of a Queen and King, the Coronation, Good Times to Camelot Bad Moments, Assassination, Saying Goodbye.  Some of the funeral pictures especially still move me, a full page color of Jackie with Caroline and John Jr observing the parade pass where the sadness in her face is painful to see. 

It ends with a page and a half epilogue by Theodore H. White in which Jackie mentions Camelot three times in his interview of her, one in the context of JFK enjoying the recorded title song many times.  With which White ends.  For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.

It leaves me believing JFK enjoyed overall and was proud of his thousand days, and more.

If anyone should wish to see for yourself, it's still available for as little as $1.55 plus 4-5 dollars shipping.  I can't understand why a paperback version is significantly higher than the hardback.

Life in Camelot: The Kennedy Years: Kunhardt, Philip: 9780316210898: Amazon.com: Books 

I'd not read the text since I got the book 33 years ago.  Interesting backstory on Joe Sr. and Luce.  Politically opposed yet friends that respected each other.  To the point Luce stood aside somewhat in the Time - Life support of Nixon in 1960.  Which may well have swayed the historically close election.