Tucker Carlson did it again

[Joseph McBride]

And the Deep State (represented by Johnson's "Wise Men") deposed Johnson in 1968.

From my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

“THE WHOLE BAY OF PIGS THING”

 

The late Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War goes where Caro and others are afraid to inquire. Fearlessly connecting the dots in his research, Oglesby attempts to put together the pieces of the complex factors surrounding the assassination to explicate its pivotal importance in modern American history. His 1976 book is less known than any of Caro’s but is a thoroughly revisionist, groundbreaking study of the pattern of American history from 1960 through Watergate. Oglesby offers one of the most acute studies of the turbulent political context in which the assassination occurred. He broadens the topic from a study of some aspects of the physical evidence in the case to the struggle for dominance of American politics between the internationalist, old-money Eastern establishment (the “Yankees”) and the new money of the more conservative Southwestern and Western oil and gas men and defense contractors (the “Cowboys”) from the 1950s onward.

 

That political power shift led to the rise not only of Eisenhower and LBJ but also of the Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Oglesby studies the assassination as the turning point in a process that had already been underway but was accelerated by Kennedy’s murder. The Yankee and Cowboy War analyzes the tensions among warring American political, intelligence, and business factions over Vietnam and other aspects of foreign policy, including the United States’ combative relationships with the USSR, China, and Cuba. Oglesby’s book is one of the most acute and provocative studies of the political context in which the assassination occurred and that resulting transfer of power, often by clandestine means.

 

Like Scott before and after him, Oglesby draws direct interconnections between American intelligence operatives and Cuban exiles involved in both Dallas and Watergate. Those convulsions have been portrayed in the mainstream media and conventional history books as separate and aberrational rather than central to that period in American history. Oglesby analyzes President Nixon’s use of the suggestive phrase “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” on the 1972 Watergate “smoking gun tape” in terms of Nixon’s guilty knowledge about and/or involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Nixon’s November 21–22 visit to Dallas was for the annual convention of American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages, at which Lyndon Johnson had spoken two days before the assassination. Nixon was one of four U.S. presidents in Dallas on the day of the assassination, also including George H. W. Bush as well as Kennedy and Johnson.

 

On the “smoking gun” tape recorded on June 23, 1972, the day after the final Watergate break-in, Nixon committed an obstruction of justice that would eventually lead to his resignation. He ordered his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to tell CIA director Richard Helms to make the FBI stay out of the Watergate investigation. At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1962, Helms had been the CIA’s deputy director for plans (i.e., in charge of the Agency’s covert action or “dirty tricks” department). On the tape, Nixon referred to both Helms and Watergate burglar and CIA man E. Howard Hunt, who was blackmailing him:

 

We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. . . . Of course, this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hankypanky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.

 

Later that day, Nixon instructed Haldeman to go tell Helms:

 

Very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved — you happen to know that if it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate — both for CIA and for the country, at this time, and for American foreign policy. Just tell him to lay off. . . . the problem is it tracks back to the Bay of Pigs and it tracks back to some other, the leads run out to people who had no involvement in this, except by contracts and connection, but it gets into areas that are liable to be realized.

 

What was Nixon really talking about here? Haldeman wrote in his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978, with Joseph DiMona), that Nixon used “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” as coded language: “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination. . . . After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up. . . . In a chilling parallel to their cover-up at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA.” Haldeman’s book relates that when he went to see Helms on Nixon’s order, he told the CIA director,

 

The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown. Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, “The Bay of Pigs has nothing to do with this! I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs!” Silence. I just sat there. I was absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story? Finally I said, “I’m just following my instructions, Dick. That is what the President told me to relay to you.” Helms was settling back. “All right,” he said. But the atmosphere had changed. Now, surprisingly, the two CIA officials [Helms and deputy director General Vernon Walters] expressed no concern about the [impeachable Nixon] request that Walters go see FBI Director L. Patrick Gray.

 

Interpreting the continuing cover-up of Dallas as a principal motive of Nixon’s ordering the CIA to cover up Watergate, the action that led to his impeachment and resignation from office, Oglesby portrays Nixon’s ouster from the presidency not as the result of the bungled “third-rate burglary” portrayed in the press but as a “countercoup” by the CIA against Nixon, stemming from the successful Dallas conspiracy. Nixon’s battle for control with the Agency is also portrayed as the cause of the Watergate affair by revisionist historians Jim Hougan in Secret Agenda; Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (1991); and Stone in Nixon. Oglesby considers the Watergate break-ins to have been staged and deliberately sabotaged by the CIA to draw Nixon into the series of crimes he predictably committed to cover up the break-ins. That coup enabled a removal of the president without assassination. But it was not a bloodless coup. Oglesby writes in extensive, compelling detail about the 1972 “Watergate plane crash” in Chicago that killed CIA-connected Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, herself a CIA veteran, along with CBS News correspondent Michele Clark and forty-three other people, as a means of stopping Hunt’s husband from blackmailing Nixon.

 

Oglesby further interprets an earlier coup, President Johnson’s forced “abdication” in 1968, as the outcome of the internal power struggle between the “Cowboy” faction that LBJ represented and the Eastern “Yankee” elite. Oglesby writes that Johnson’s grudging agreement not to seek another term as president, “as well as his switch to a negotiated settlement line on Vietnam,” was a “bloodless power play.” The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of January 1968 and the international Gold Crisis that resulted from the weakening of the U.S. economic position by the war caused Johnson to be forced out of power by his “Wise Men,” the group of senior leaders who regularly advised him on policy as a kind of shadow government (the epitome of what’s meant by “deep politics”). Drawn largely from the leadership of the Eastern establishment, they included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. On March 25, 1968, they told Johnson the war could not be won the way he was pursuing it and that he could not run for another term as president.

 

Johnson surprised the nation by announcing “his” decision on television six days later. He was bitter about it and, according to the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, Henry Brandon, Johnson told him later that year, “The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.” Oglesby interprets that forced abdication as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men. He writes that they wanted to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.”

 

That the ouster from office of Kennedy’s successor resulted in America eventually losing the war in Vietnam was another tragic historical irony. After Nixon’s ascension in place of Johnson, the new president wound down the war diplomatically but with excruciating slowness while expanding the war enormously in terms of American firepower. That devastating escalation was partly made possible by Nixon’s canny decision to end the draft, which helped reduce domestic dissent. His maddening gradualism in bringing the war to the conclusion he had promised in his 1968 campaign but did not deliver during his tenure in office was the subject of a question put to a member of his administration at an event I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972, as a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal.

 

Henry Kissinger’s deputy William H. Sullivan (who later was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Iran when the hostage crisis erupted in 1979) was asked at that event why the U.S. was still in Vietnam. He answered that it was because the U.S. needed to control the oil in the South China Sea. That kind of candid public revelation about realpolitik and the economic causations of war is most unusual among government officials. What I reported was picked up by the Associated Press and went around the world on its wire, although it was eclipsed by another revelation I reported from the same event, Sullivan’s comment that the Paris peace talks soon would be resuming. Following the stir both statements caused, Sullivan claimed he had not made them. I produced my notes to prove that he had. Then it was claimed that Sullivan’s speech to a university organization had been off-the-record. I produced a letter from that organization inviting our newspaper to cover his appearance on campus. Studies of the Vietnam War rarely discuss the importance of oil in motivating the long U.S. presence there.

 

Revisionist (i.e., truthful) historians such as Oglesby and Scott attempt to make sense of these often-hidden aspects of modern American history. They analyze them as part of the workings of the deep state, a line of inquiry that helps clarify the seemingly mad spectacle of American foreign policy from Watergate and Vietnam and continuing through all the internal battles and external crises that have followed. That history takes us through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and careens catastrophically from 9/11 to the attempted Trump Coup. The parade of nearly constant destructive upheavals and calamities our country has undergone since the end of World War II demonstrates the continuing validity of Scott’s 1993 thesis about the regularity of “perceived threats” in modern American history and how those threats have been resolved through “collusive secrecy and law-breaking” and how they “deserve to be regarded as periodic readjustments of the open political system in which we live.” Even though the Cold War ended in 1991, such upheavals and readjustments, often carried out by violent means, remain the norm in the conduct of American foreign policy and the central role the military-industrial complex plays in our national life. By studying the functioning of the deep state that way, Scott writes, “we should look within, not outside, the political status quo, if we hope to understand the [Kennedy] assassination.”

 

Beyond the Cold War period, what Chomsky calls a “constant parade of enemies” has been conjured up by the U.S. government and its propaganda apparatus, including the media. They serve as focal points of enmity for rallying the public behind the ongoing interests of the military-industrial complex and the policy of permanent or semi-permanent war (hence 9/11 and the “War on Terror”). And so, despite periodic changes of party control, the country remains largely in the hands of the same deep power structure that killed President Kennedy in 1963. “But what did we all believe in 1964 about the integrity of our upper government?” Oglesby asks. “What did we believe about spies, clandestinism, realpolitik, about intrigue as a method of decision-making and murder as an instrument of policy? In 1964 we could not yet even see through the fraud we call ‘the Gulf of Tonkin incident.’”

 

Yet as a result of that atmosphere of deceit, there burst forth a flood of public distrust that was, perhaps, the beginning of a fresh start for those who could face the harsh new awareness. For as Salandria put it in 1994,

 

Not only did the killing of JFK destroy the American public’s confidence in the presidency but in essentially all aspects of the legitimacy of the government. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and respected members of the Congress and of the American Establishment placed their names on the Warren Report, which the American public considered to be a fraud. The public lost its confidence in the media, which refused to investigate the killing. These changes were significant and important, and they can be traced and are traced by so many of us to the assassination.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for sharing. The reverberations are still felt today. The JFK assassination is like a thread on a garment; if you pull on it, the web of lies unravels like a garment, and every significant event in the aftermath that changed public opinion comes into the spotlight and must be examined too. Modern American history is built on a lie, and nothing will be right until the truth is laid bare.  

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks for that Joe.

Matt, who was Hunt working for when he joined the Plumbers?

As Nixon was being cornered, he realized that the Mullen Company was a CIA front.  And it was Helms who urged the owner to hire Hunt.  And when Hunt began working for the White House he was still on the Mullen payroll.

Helms had ensnared him.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

28 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Thanks for that Joe.

Matt, who was Hunt working for when he joined the Plumbers?

As Nixon was being cornered, he realized that the Mullen Company was a CIA front.  And it was Helms who urged the owner to hire Hunt.  And when Hunt began working for the White House he was still on the Mullen payroll.

Helms had ensnared him.

 

A little OT, but in the ballpark. How Biden torpedoed an outsider for CIA Director. Back in the Carter days....

https://theintercept.com/empire-politician/biden-and-jimmy-carters-cia-nominee/

[Guest]

On 1/19/2023 at 9:23 PM, James DiEugenio said:

Then he goes to how Woodward was not really a journalist but a naval intel officer.

He brought down Nixon so that Ford, the Warren Commissioner, could come in and keep the lid on both Watergate and the JFK case.

Hi

Edited February 15, 2023 by Lance Payette

[Joe Bauer]

3 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

And the Deep State (represented by Johnson's "Wise Men") deposed Johnson in 1968.

From my 2021 book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

“THE WHOLE BAY OF PIGS THING”

 

The late Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War goes where Caro and others are afraid to inquire. Fearlessly connecting the dots in his research, Oglesby attempts to put together the pieces of the complex factors surrounding the assassination to explicate its pivotal importance in modern American history. His 1976 book is less known than any of Caro’s but is a thoroughly revisionist, groundbreaking study of the pattern of American history from 1960 through Watergate. Oglesby offers one of the most acute studies of the turbulent political context in which the assassination occurred. He broadens the topic from a study of some aspects of the physical evidence in the case to the struggle for dominance of American politics between the internationalist, old-money Eastern establishment (the “Yankees”) and the new money of the more conservative Southwestern and Western oil and gas men and defense contractors (the “Cowboys”) from the 1950s onward.

 

That political power shift led to the rise not only of Eisenhower and LBJ but also of the Californians Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Oglesby studies the assassination as the turning point in a process that had already been underway but was accelerated by Kennedy’s murder. The Yankee and Cowboy War analyzes the tensions among warring American political, intelligence, and business factions over Vietnam and other aspects of foreign policy, including the United States’ combative relationships with the USSR, China, and Cuba. Oglesby’s book is one of the most acute and provocative studies of the political context in which the assassination occurred and that resulting transfer of power, often by clandestine means.

 

Like Scott before and after him, Oglesby draws direct interconnections between American intelligence operatives and Cuban exiles involved in both Dallas and Watergate. Those convulsions have been portrayed in the mainstream media and conventional history books as separate and aberrational rather than central to that period in American history. Oglesby analyzes President Nixon’s use of the suggestive phrase “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” on the 1972 Watergate “smoking gun tape” in terms of Nixon’s guilty knowledge about and/or involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Nixon’s November 21–22 visit to Dallas was for the annual convention of American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages, at which Lyndon Johnson had spoken two days before the assassination. Nixon was one of four U.S. presidents in Dallas on the day of the assassination, also including George H. W. Bush as well as Kennedy and Johnson.

 

On the “smoking gun” tape recorded on June 23, 1972, the day after the final Watergate break-in, Nixon committed an obstruction of justice that would eventually lead to his resignation. He ordered his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to tell CIA director Richard Helms to make the FBI stay out of the Watergate investigation. At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1962, Helms had been the CIA’s deputy director for plans (i.e., in charge of the Agency’s covert action or “dirty tricks” department). On the tape, Nixon referred to both Helms and Watergate burglar and CIA man E. Howard Hunt, who was blackmailing him:

 

We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. . . . Of course, this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hankypanky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.

 

Later that day, Nixon instructed Haldeman to go tell Helms:

 

Very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved — you happen to know that if it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate — both for CIA and for the country, at this time, and for American foreign policy. Just tell him to lay off. . . . the problem is it tracks back to the Bay of Pigs and it tracks back to some other, the leads run out to people who had no involvement in this, except by contracts and connection, but it gets into areas that are liable to be realized.

 

What was Nixon really talking about here? Haldeman wrote in his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978, with Joseph DiMona), that Nixon used “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” as coded language: “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination. . . . After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up. . . . In a chilling parallel to their cover-up at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA.” Haldeman’s book relates that when he went to see Helms on Nixon’s order, he told the CIA director,

 

The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown. Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, “The Bay of Pigs has nothing to do with this! I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs!” Silence. I just sat there. I was absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story? Finally I said, “I’m just following my instructions, Dick. That is what the President told me to relay to you.” Helms was settling back. “All right,” he said. But the atmosphere had changed. Now, surprisingly, the two CIA officials [Helms and deputy director General Vernon Walters] expressed no concern about the [impeachable Nixon] request that Walters go see FBI Director L. Patrick Gray.

 

Interpreting the continuing cover-up of Dallas as a principal motive of Nixon’s ordering the CIA to cover up Watergate, the action that led to his impeachment and resignation from office, Oglesby portrays Nixon’s ouster from the presidency not as the result of the bungled “third-rate burglary” portrayed in the press but as a “countercoup” by the CIA against Nixon, stemming from the successful Dallas conspiracy. Nixon’s battle for control with the Agency is also portrayed as the cause of the Watergate affair by revisionist historians Jim Hougan in Secret Agenda; Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (1991); and Stone in Nixon. Oglesby considers the Watergate break-ins to have been staged and deliberately sabotaged by the CIA to draw Nixon into the series of crimes he predictably committed to cover up the break-ins. That coup enabled a removal of the president without assassination. But it was not a bloodless coup. Oglesby writes in extensive, compelling detail about the 1972 “Watergate plane crash” in Chicago that killed CIA-connected Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, herself a CIA veteran, along with CBS News correspondent Michele Clark and forty-three other people, as a means of stopping Hunt’s husband from blackmailing Nixon.

 

Oglesby further interprets an earlier coup, President Johnson’s forced “abdication” in 1968, as the outcome of the internal power struggle between the “Cowboy” faction that LBJ represented and the Eastern “Yankee” elite. Oglesby writes that Johnson’s grudging agreement not to seek another term as president, “as well as his switch to a negotiated settlement line on Vietnam,” was a “bloodless power play.” The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of January 1968 and the international Gold Crisis that resulted from the weakening of the U.S. economic position by the war caused Johnson to be forced out of power by his “Wise Men,” the group of senior leaders who regularly advised him on policy as a kind of shadow government (the epitome of what’s meant by “deep politics”). Drawn largely from the leadership of the Eastern establishment, they included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. On March 25, 1968, they told Johnson the war could not be won the way he was pursuing it and that he could not run for another term as president.

 

Johnson surprised the nation by announcing “his” decision on television six days later. He was bitter about it and, according to the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, Henry Brandon, Johnson told him later that year, “The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.” Oglesby interprets that forced abdication as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men. He writes that they wanted to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.”

 

That the ouster from office of Kennedy’s successor resulted in America eventually losing the war in Vietnam was another tragic historical irony. After Nixon’s ascension in place of Johnson, the new president wound down the war diplomatically but with excruciating slowness while expanding the war enormously in terms of American firepower. That devastating escalation was partly made possible by Nixon’s canny decision to end the draft, which helped reduce domestic dissent. His maddening gradualism in bringing the war to the conclusion he had promised in his 1968 campaign but did not deliver during his tenure in office was the subject of a question put to a member of his administration at an event I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972, as a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal.

 

Henry Kissinger’s deputy William H. Sullivan (who later was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Iran when the hostage crisis erupted in 1979) was asked at that event why the U.S. was still in Vietnam. He answered that it was because the U.S. needed to control the oil in the South China Sea. That kind of candid public revelation about realpolitik and the economic causations of war is most unusual among government officials. What I reported was picked up by the Associated Press and went around the world on its wire, although it was eclipsed by another revelation I reported from the same event, Sullivan’s comment that the Paris peace talks soon would be resuming. Following the stir both statements caused, Sullivan claimed he had not made them. I produced my notes to prove that he had. Then it was claimed that Sullivan’s speech to a university organization had been off-the-record. I produced a letter from that organization inviting our newspaper to cover his appearance on campus. Studies of the Vietnam War rarely discuss the importance of oil in motivating the long U.S. presence there.

 

Revisionist (i.e., truthful) historians such as Oglesby and Scott attempt to make sense of these often-hidden aspects of modern American history. They analyze them as part of the workings of the deep state, a line of inquiry that helps clarify the seemingly mad spectacle of American foreign policy from Watergate and Vietnam and continuing through all the internal battles and external crises that have followed. That history takes us through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and careens catastrophically from 9/11 to the attempted Trump Coup. The parade of nearly constant destructive upheavals and calamities our country has undergone since the end of World War II demonstrates the continuing validity of Scott’s 1993 thesis about the regularity of “perceived threats” in modern American history and how those threats have been resolved through “collusive secrecy and law-breaking” and how they “deserve to be regarded as periodic readjustments of the open political system in which we live.” Even though the Cold War ended in 1991, such upheavals and readjustments, often carried out by violent means, remain the norm in the conduct of American foreign policy and the central role the military-industrial complex plays in our national life. By studying the functioning of the deep state that way, Scott writes, “we should look within, not outside, the political status quo, if we hope to understand the [Kennedy] assassination.”

 

Beyond the Cold War period, what Chomsky calls a “constant parade of enemies” has been conjured up by the U.S. government and its propaganda apparatus, including the media. They serve as focal points of enmity for rallying the public behind the ongoing interests of the military-industrial complex and the policy of permanent or semi-permanent war (hence 9/11 and the “War on Terror”). And so, despite periodic changes of party control, the country remains largely in the hands of the same deep power structure that killed President Kennedy in 1963. “But what did we all believe in 1964 about the integrity of our upper government?” Oglesby asks. “What did we believe about spies, clandestinism, realpolitik, about intrigue as a method of decision-making and murder as an instrument of policy? In 1964 we could not yet even see through the fraud we call ‘the Gulf of Tonkin incident.’”

 

Yet as a result of that atmosphere of deceit, there burst forth a flood of public distrust that was, perhaps, the beginning of a fresh start for those who could face the harsh new awareness. For as Salandria put it in 1994,

 

Not only did the killing of JFK destroy the American public’s confidence in the presidency but in essentially all aspects of the legitimacy of the government. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and respected members of the Congress and of the American Establishment placed their names on the Warren Report, which the American public considered to be a fraud. The public lost its confidence in the media, which refused to investigate the killing. These changes were significant and important, and they can be traced and are traced by so many of us to the assassination.

 

Thanks for posting this JM.

And this is just one small part of your book? 

It inspires me to buy and read it in it's entirety.

I had a high school friend join the Navy in 1969. He served on the Air Craft Carrier Oriskany.

Pac duty off of Vietnam.

Home ship of John McCain.

Scene of a huge fire with many deaths earlier than 1969.

I still talk to him maybe once a year. He likes to share stories of his time on the carrier.

Just a few months ago he told me that his ship's fighter jet combat action over Vietnam was so hot it was often 24/7.

He marveled at the tonnage of ordinances that his ship's fighters alone dropped on their missions.

The numbers of tonnage was so great, he said the average American probably couldn't fathom it's massiveness.

I once read that we inundated Viet Nam with more bombing power than we dropped in all of WW II?

And yes, Vietnam was indeed a battle over natural resources such as oil and rubber?

Between us and the Soviet Union?

 

 

Edited January 21, 2023 by Joe Bauer

[Matthew Koch]

2 hours ago, Lance Payette said:

In Conspiracy World, people say things like this and no one laughs.

It must be disheartening for a comedian like Jim.

"When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the losers." 

-Socrates 

[Paul Brancato]

Thank you Mr. McBride for posting this section of your book. Yankee and Cowboy Wars truly influenced my thinking, as did PD Scott’s many books and essays. 
Ben keeps reminding us that in his view Trump is a casualty too. I’d be curious who agrees with that. I don’t. But I did notice Oliver Stone, in the interview that DiEugenio posted, called out the Russia hoax, something Glenn Greenwald and others agree with. I’m increasingly inclined to agree with this point of view. What annoyed me about the Russia collusion story in the first place were the very clear facts pointing to the very non-Russian Cambridge Analytica as being the tool that threw the election to Trump, and in the second place to Comey’s pre election bombshells about Hillary Clinton. We don’t need Russian election interference to explain any of that. 

[Matt Allison]

9 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

But I did notice Oliver Stone, in the interview that DiEugenio posted, called out the Russia hoax, something Glenn Greenwald and others agree with.

Paul Manafort was Trump's campaign manager, so I'm confused as to how he'd have difficulty understanding the collusion that occurred with Russia.

Oliver Stone backed the wrong horse with Putin, and unless he approves of the genocide we're seeing in Ukraine, he should admit his mistake now.

[Paul Brancato]

23 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Paul Manafort was Trump's campaign manager, so I'm confused as to how he'd have difficulty understanding the collusion that occurred with Russia.

Oliver Stone backed the wrong horse with Putin, and unless he approves of the genocide we're seeing in Ukraine, he should admit his mistake now.

No doubt about Manafort, or about Trump ties with Russia. It’s election interference I’m referring to. And I don’t think Stone backs Putin. I think his position is more anti NATO than pro Putin. 

[James DiEugenio]

I have the drug case lawyer from Arizona on ignore.  But when someone posts him I have to look at his stuff.

The comments about Hunt and the Mullen Company were stated by Nixon himself. Haldeman quotes him in his book.

After Morley's book, for anyone to say that Helms and Nixon were not doing a scorpion's dance shows just ignorant they are.

[Joseph McBride]

That great scene between Nixon and Helms

in Oliver Stone's NIXON over the Kennedy

assassination documents was not in the original

theatrical release but is on the homevideo

editions as an extra. It's essential to the movie

and true to the situation between them. Why

it was originally not used I don't know for sure.

Edited January 21, 2023 by Joseph McBride

[Matt Allison]

1 minute ago, Joseph McBride said:

That great scene between Nixon and Helms

in Oliver Stone's NIXON was not in the original

theatrical release but is on the homevideo

It is indeed a great scene.

 

1 minute ago, Joseph McBride said:

Why it was originally not used I don't know for sure.

Because Helms would have sued him.

[Joseph McBride]

I heard that but don't know for sure. What's your source?

[Matt Allison]

27 minutes ago, Joseph McBride said:

I heard that but don't know for sure. What's your source?

"Former CIA director Richard Helms had a lawyer write Stone. Though scenes with Helms, as played by Sam Waterston, were filmed, none made the final cut. Stone insists it's because the film was too long."

https://www.newsweek.com/hollywoods-most-controversial-director-oliver-stone-takes-our-most-controversial-president-richard

 

With regard to Howard Hunt, unless I'm mistaken, Nixon was right there in the thick of it with the planning for what became the Bay of Pigs invasion, and I assume he was already on friendly terms with Hunt before he became President.