John J. McCloy

[Tim Gratz]

Jim wrote:

Nov. 1959 John J. McCloy and the US arms negotiators feared the Paris Summit and the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

Jim, your basis for this? From my memory I do not recall the proposed agenda for the Paris Peace Conference of 1960.

[Jim Root]

Tim

Suggest you go to the source but this summary gives some background on the controversy that was going on at the time.

Document 19: State Department memcon, "Meeting of the Secretary's Disarmament Advisers," 3 November 1959

Source: National Archives, RG 59, decimal files 1955-1959, 600.0012/11-359

Sharp inter-agency disagreements over whether to publicly abandon the goal of a comprehensive test ban and resume nuclear testing persisted but the State Department's stance against any sudden policy changes prevailed. Instead, the Department supported proposals for technical discussions with the Soviets as a way to "sharpen the issue of underground control to the point where we could propose a limited agreement" that would include provisions for a research program on underground test verification. (Note 42) During an early November 1959 meeting with "establishment" disarmament advisers, Philip Farley reviewed the state of play. At Geneva, the U.S. had presented the Soviets with technical conclusions on underground testing that could bring Washington "face to face with the question of whether we are going ahead with a proposal for a limited treaty and either resume tests or declare our freedom of action with respect to further testing." The Soviets were unlikely to accept a limited treaty while the British were seeking a three year moratorium on underground testing. That concerned the State Department because, as Herter put it, the West would "get nothing in return." Nevertheless, he recognized the need for some give in the West's position because world opinion was suspicious of the U.S. stance. As former Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) General Gruenther explained many believed that the U.S. was pushing the difficulty of underground test verification as a "device to get out of the negotiations." Killian explained the theoretical challenge posed by the "Latter Hole" although McCloy was doubtful because "the difficulties of constructing the big hole were almost insurmountable." The advisers also discussed the UN disarmament committee, the Charles Coolidge study on disarmament, and the problem of "stability in the missile age," which concluded with Gruenther's sardonic statement that to "to proceed with disarmament we will have to increase our defense expenditures."

Days before this Nov. 3, 1959 meeting Lee Harvey Oswald had entered the Soviet Union with his knowledge of the U-2.

It was an interesting time and McCloy was in the thick of it just as he was in 1945 and where he would return in 1964.

A look at John F. Kennedy's first press conference shows the position that John J. McCloy held in this area. It is my belief that if the Paris Summit goes off Richard Nixon wins the 1960 election and JFK dies of old age. But that summit did not happen (helping JFK get elected) and McCloy's position in Arms negotiations is elevated.

Press Conference #1, January 25, 1961

President John F. Kennedy

State Department Auditorium

Washington, D. C .

6:00 p.m., EST

418 In attendance

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Won't you be seated.

I have several announcements to make, first. I have a statement about the Geneva negotiations for an atomic test ban. These negotiations, as you know, are scheduled to begin early in February. They are of great importance, and we will need more time to prepare a clear American position. So we are consulting with other governments, and we are asking to have it put off until late March.

As you know, Mr. John McCloy is my principal adviser in this field, and he has organized a distinguished panel of experts, headed by Dr. James Fisk of the Bell Laboratories -- and Mr. Salinger will have a list of the names at the end of the conference -- who are going to study previous positions that we have taken in this field, and also recommend to Mr. McCloy, for my guidance, what our position would be in late March, when we hope the tests will resume.

Is it a coincidence that after McCloy is relieved as arms negotiator in 1963 a new president happens again and McCloy is once again the new Presidents principal adviser?

Jim Root

[Tim Gratz]

John J McCloy to Lee Rankin on the SBT:

http://www.jfklancer.com/McCloy-Rankin.html

[Jim Root]

Tim

Is there a question here?

Jim Root

[Tim Gratz]

Well I guess it seemed rather obvious to me that had McCloy been a conspirator he would not have been raising those kind of questions.

[Jim Root]

Tim

I'm going to repost what I wrote a few posts up. Try to follow the logic.

Tim

If Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter the greatest dis-information campaign has been to make the American public believe that he was not the shooter. If that has been the intent of US Intelligence, they have been successful. If they were involved in the assassination, they were also succcessful because more that 40 years later we have not uncovered the information that proves any sort of conspiracy capable of convincing a majority of the people.

For myself I have tried to develop a motive for why Oswald would have attempted to assassinate Edwin Walker. That trail has led to everything I have posted.

The three points (coverups?) I spoke of above all come from my research and are all proveable, travel, Hosty note and Raleigh Call yet are not incorporated into the Warren Report. I continue to ask why?

Maybe we should take Oswald at his word. If he was a Patsy of US Intelligence perhaps he had a motive to shoot the President. But if this is true only those that dispatched him to Helsinki would have understood this. If Walker, as I believe is possible, met Oswald on his way to Helsinki, it would explain alot.

Would you agree that if Oswald met Walker while traveling to Helsinki the assassiantion story would appear to be very different?

By the way, didnt McCloy suggest that at some time evidence might be found that might show that Oswald was an intelligence asset? Why do you think that he would make hat suggestion?

Tim, you can make any assumption you wish from the notes that you posted dealing with McCloy but what is a fact is the three missing items that I continue to harp on. Like so many people you wish to prove conspiracy by showing that LHO did not shoot or that there were additional shooters. As VB points out there are some 82 different shooters that conspiracy advocates have suggested but have not been able to conclusively prove any.

I feel that if there were conspirators they had to have come together before Nov. 22, 1963! And, we might assume, with some confidence, that they had the ability to hide their existance, perhaps by controlling the Warren Commission.

I will repeat once again that I have identified three points that are missing from the Commission Report. Collectively they could potentially prove a conspiracy yet each were missed (?) or overlooked by McCloy who had used similar infomation to break the Black Tom Case that made his career. Something I doubt.

If a sensitive name was on the passenger list with Oswald on the way to Helsinki...? If Oswald did not go directly to Helsinki (perhaps Hamburg first)...? Who had access to the Hosty note that said where Oswald was working before the motorcade route was decided (a rather important piece of information for the conspirators to have if they wanted to set Oswald up or use him as a shooter. This information was available but not given a Commission Exhibit Number or followed up)? The simple fact that Oswald did attempt to contact one John Hurt after the assassination and that that information never found its way into the Warren Report seems to prove that a full investigation was thwarted. But by whom?

I hold open the possibility that it could have been thwarted by McCloy, the man that John B. Hurt had worked for.

Do you find any logic in this train of thought at all?

Jim Root

[James Richards]

Jim,

In your research on McCloy, have you ever come across the name Lowell Mayberry?

Mayberry was a close associate of McCloy, Max Taylor and was utilized regularly by Henry Grunewald to apply political pressure when needed. From what I can gather, Mayberry had mysterious connections into the White House and was able to manipulate highly placed personnel.

I submit that Mayberry was responsible for actually securing the participation of several initially reluctant Warren Commission members.

James

[John Simkin]

I submit that Mayberry was responsible for actually securing the participation of several initially reluctant Warren Commission members.

Please tell us more.

[James Richards]

I submit that Mayberry was responsible for actually securing the participation of several initially reluctant Warren Commission members.

Please tell us more.

John,

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot to go one here. I was hoping a forum member might be able to shed some more light on Lowell Mayberry.

Nathaniel Heidenheimer began a thread the other day on Henry Grunewald which triggered something from way back in the memory bank. I recalled reading about a man that was recognized in the corridors of White House power as a Mr. Fixit. If something needed to be done, then Lowell Mayberry was the man. He had been involved in the early 1950's with Grunewald, both men at the time sponsored by the powerful labor chiefs to make back-door contacts with influential political leaders.

Grunewald had been an investigator with the FBI and it is possible that he was using connections there to get dirt on those who did not wish to play their game.

One of Mayberry's more powerful associations was with John McCloy and an investigator friend of mine believes that McCloy went to Mayberry to secure participation on the Warren Commission. This of course in addition to LBJ applying some pressure of his own.

Given the material my friend has gathered over the years, it is a persuasive argument. However, since the research material is not mine, I can not post it here.

Anyway, once the personnel for the Warren Commission was settled and their work had begun, Mayberry passed away in early 1964 at the age of 74.

I do believe that if someone has access to any of the major New England libraries, Lowell Mayberry would be worth checking into.

BTW, Googling Mayberry comes up with nothing and the only published writer I know of to ever mention Mayberry was Victor Reisel. And then there was no follow up.

FWIW.

James

Edited November 27, 2007 by James Richards

[Jim Root]

James

Sorry I do not have any info at hand. Somewhere in my files I have a War Department flow chart from the WWII era. McCloy employed many "investigators" when he began to form the Intelligence apparatus that would develop into the OSS. That sounds like a potential link.

I might suggest that you try to contact a Pentagon Historian to provide some help in this area. My contact has retired recently and my pipeline into that area of research has dried up for the moment.

Let me know what you find.

Jim Root

[William Kelly]

Jim, Are you familiar with this McCloy/CBS angle?

Roger Feinman, a attorney who I think lost his legal license in New York while representing Robert Groden in a JFK assassination related case, previously worked for CBS and made a presentation on CBS and ABC and the assassination at one of the DC conferences.

http:/members.aol.com/yesinmylife/index.html

"(2) Once the decision was made that CBS would defend the Warren Report in the guise of an independent investigation, Dick Salant began to engage his subordinates in a secret, behind teh scenes collaboration with a former member of the Warren Commission. John J. McCloy - a collaboration that both men later falsely denied until their flat-out lie was exposed by documentary proof."

The details of the CBS/McCloy collaboration is centered around McCloy's daughter, who worked at CBS.

"McLoy died in 1990. But in 1992, a reporter for the Village Voice confronted both Salant and Ellen McCloy with copies of the documents you have seen and these notes in her handwriting. Miss McCloy admitted acting as a coinduit. Salant, while not disputing an arrangement he had once vehemently denied, now claimed there was nothing unusual about it."

"But this note, from Ellen McCloy to Les Midgley, implies at the very least that John J. McCloy felt unusually comfortable in his relationship with the executives of CBS News even as they prepared a purportedly independent investigative report about the Warren Commission....."

Thanks to Bernice Moore for calling attention to Feinman's article over at JFK Research.

Bill Kelly

Edited December 1, 2007 by William Kelly

[John Dolva]

Jim: "For myself I have tried to develop a motive for why Oswald would have attempted to assassinate Edwin Walker."

___________________________

Walker was stationary and in an illuminated room at a window. The 'crack shot' Lee who could make kill shots each one successively potentally more difficult, yet progressively 'spot on' on a target moving down, away and 'weaving' while shooting towards the sun is phenomenally different. IOW IF Leee shot at Walker, then the possibility exists that he meant to miss and that Walker would have evidence that he was shot at.

If one considers Lee's handwritten draft of his thoughts on life in the CCCP then one finds a clearly stated admiration for the Minute Men and a statement of a sympathetic strategy that he saw as an 'improvement' that could usher in a new age. He proposed to take this to certain people and possibly did so thus enmeshing himself in the events that followed. From then on he was 'steered' and 'guided' in ways he could not concieve.

Considering this a motive emerges. He didn't 'attempt to assassinate' Walker. He shot in Walkers direction and missed. He did assassinate Kennedy. IF so, his strategy is revealed as causing a clash between opposing forces and justifying a civil war from which his (and Walkers) 'new frontier' would emerge victorious. Perhaps this has been successful?

In turn, he 'played with the big boys' and was chewed up and spat out.

Patsy not only means the fool or fall guy, but also 'the cheated, or 'tricked' one'.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

McCloy's trip to Brazil and involvement in the Coup D'etat of 1964 have interested me because of the way they overlap the activities of the Warren Commission, and in some ways seem to have been a higher priority for Rockefeller's agile insider: this site provided some interesting background on Rockefellers growing differences with Kennedy on Latin America, and was, for me, usefull context on the McCloy's Brazilian hollidays from his WC duties.

By the way, do we know more about McCloy's ties with Lincoln Gordon, when both were in Germany after WWII?

A. J. Langguth wrote that while ambassador to Brazil, Gordon knew about a CIA way of channeling money to rightist pols through a CIA front called Instituto Brasileiro de Acao Democatica (IBAD). Some CIA activities were cloaked by Marshall Plan activities in post-war Europe. Similarly the CIA's police training program, OPS, was cloaked in Latin America by AID programs. Langguth suggests that both Kennedy and Gordon issued warnings to Goulart about his cabinet in 1963, but also says that the latter "with the help of the CIA had begun to to put toether hisown file-- a prosecution berief-- against Goulart's government. He kept track of those unions that Goulart was seeding with suspeted Communists: the petroleum workers, the merchant marines, the railroad unions, the communications workers, the bank clerks; and Walters kept him informed of potential subersion within Goulart's military household" (pp. 99-100 Hidden Terrors). Combined with the following picture of large differences between Rockefeller(and the CIA?) and Kennedy over Latin American policy, I wonder just how much the CIA was operating outside of Kennedy' control in Brazil in 1963.

Also note the reference to William Cameron Townsend and Wycliffe Bible Translators in the following.

-----------------

Brazil 1964 - Brazil is the largest nation in the South American continent, and one of the world's richest in terms of natural resources. In 1961 a young idealistic nationalist named João Goulart became president and he began promoting policies of land reform, nationalization, and industrialization to try to make the most of his nation's enormous potential.

During Goulart's presidency he became good friends with President Kennedy who began the Alliance for Progress foreign aid initiatives involving Brazil in 1961. These initiatives were made on a government-to-government basis, sidestepping the World Bank and the IMF and the profit-driven initiatives of Wall Street, and they were widely criticized by Establishment spokesmen such as Nelson and David Rockefeller, and in Wall Street mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine, and in McCloy's CFR journal Foreign Affairs.

Gerard Colby in his book Thy Will Be Done offers David Rockefeller's perspective on how the United States should approach foreign economic development, and the quote within it is from Rockefeller's paper, "A Reappraisal of the Alliance for Progress," written in February of 1963,

The Cold War doctrine of counterinsurgency had brought U.S. policy full circle, blurring means and ends: Development was necessary for order, and order was necessary for development.

David Rockefeller had explained the first half of this thesis from an exclusively corporate interpretation of development in 1963. He had called upon President Kennedy to shift foreign economic aid away from government-to-government aid. Such aid allowed governments in underdeveloped countries to fund publicly owned enterprises that competed with privately owned (often American controlled) companies. Local government aid, in turn, encouraged political independence from Washington and greater national sovereignty - including nationalization of American holdings.

David wanted Kennedy to proclaim a shift in foreign-aid policy toward private entrepreneurs, both American and allied local investors, on the grounds that private enterprise per se was the basis of freedom:

"The first requirement is that the governments - and, as far as possible, the people - of Latin America know that the U.S. has changed its policy, so as to put primary stress on improvement in the general business climate as a prerequisite for social development and reform."

But David went beyond the classical liberal argument of the market basis for individual liberty. He extended it to suggest that U.S. policy should not merely prefer private enterprise, but should oppose public enterprise and its creation out of private corporations, no matter what the public's grievances or the corporation's crimes. David wanted a general U.S. policy that discouraged all nationalizations...

David and his corporate allies feared "possible changes in the rules of the game." To soothe corporate jitters in corporate boardrooms and securities exchanges, the "obstacles" that a developing nation usually erected to protect its infant industries, small farms, and working-class' buying power had to be done away with... Multinational corporate ideology had not yet advanced to the point of asserting that these protections were "outmoded" in their global marketplace, but this would be the next step.

JFK had very different ideas from David Rockefeller on how developing nations could realize their potential, and JFK's ideas were viewed much more favorably by those nations than were the Establishment's clever ideas promoting neo-imperialism. Perhaps that partially explains the anguish felt in Brazil, and worldwide, at the death of JFK, as Colby describes,

News of John Kennedy's murder sent a shudder through Brazil. Then came grief such as had not been shown for the death of any foreign leader since President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As then, Brazilians sensed that the world had taken a dramatic turn. A shroud had been hung over the face of the future, making the loss of Kennedy so unexpectedly personal. In Rio de Janeiro, rivers of grief swept through the streets as lines of people converged to mourn at the U.S. Embassy

Ambassador Lincoln Gordon was startled by the emotional crowds and what they could mean for President Lyndon B. Johnson in Latin America. "The experience we had that Friday afternoon and evening and the following weekend, I suppose, was repeated all over the world," he later recalled. "But in Rio it was a most dramatic thing. We opened a book at the chancery and another one at our residence, and over that weekend we had a line of people stretching for three of four blocks. It was continuous, day and night, of every class of person, every type, poor, rich, middle class, most of them weeping. It was a most extraordinary outpouring of emotion. So as a reaction to that, there would inevitably be some doubts about Kennedy's successor."

There was no doubt in Washington's higher circles, however, about Lyndon Johnson. The former Senate majority leader was no maverick like Kennedy. He was the classic insider among Washington's power brokers.

_

After Kennedy's death in November of 1963 major changes occurred in the Alliance for Progress program, changes which, as noted by Gibson, were received very favorably by David Rockefeller, as he made clear in a 1966 article he wrote for Foreign Affairs. Major changes also took place in the Brazilian government, when President Goulart was removed from power in a CIA-backed right-wing military coup in March of 1964. Brazil then endured two decades of death squads and dictatorships before any meaningful form of democracy was allowed to surface again.

The Establishment's interest in Brazil came chiefly through the Brazilian holdings of the Rockefeller family, which by the 1960's were extensive and diverse, from oil and mining, to electricity and communications, to cattle ranching, agriculture, and of course banking and investment. Much of them were managed under the umbrella of Nelson's massive multinational corporation, the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), which also included holdings throughout the rest of South and Central America, in Southeast Asia, and in Africa as well. Rockefeller's influence in South America, and the influence of the IBEC, is documented extensively in the previously mentioned book written by Gerard Colby in 1995, Thy Will Be Done - The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. As the title infers, the Rockefeller's designs on the resources of South America were cleverly cloaked by their support for Protestant evangelism, especially through the missionary work of William Cameron Townsend and Wycliffe Bible Translators. In the United States Billy Graham was the most prominent name among a host of evangelicals that have always had strong financial backing from the secular Rockefellers. This may help explain how American corporate initiatives against Third World nationalism came to be falsely portrayed by Big Christianity in America as "Christian" initiatives fighting against "Communism."

Even before João Goulart became president of Brazil the CIA had his eye on him. Colby writes,

A stocky, handsome man with a large popular following, Goulart viewed himself as [former Brazilian president] Getulio Vargas's spiritual successor in the struggle to rid Brazil of foreign domination. For that reason alone, he made Washington nervous at every step in his rise to power. As Vargas's minister of labor, he had built himself a base among Brazil's growing, restless working class. In gestures all too reminiscent of Argentina's Juan Peron, he found every opportunity to deliver rousing, populist speeches to the masses.

Colby describes how in 1963 Goulart presided over the nationalizing of a subsidiary of American-owned International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). The president of ITT then began to furiously lobby congress for an amendment to Kennedy's 1962 foreign-aid bill that would immediately cancel all aid to any country that nationalized, repudiated a contract, or specially taxed or regulated any American company. According to Colby,

Such a Big Stick approach appalled President Kennedy, who worried that it would further enflame Third World nationalism, appear to corroborate Soviet propaganda about "U.S. imperialism," and force the United States to take the side of American companies more often than was merited.

Kennedy fought the amendment to the bill, and then helped mediate a settlement between ITT and the Brazilian government. Afterwards, Goulart made an offer to buy out all American-owned utilities that were squeezing the Brazilian economy with steadily jacked up rates. Colby writes,

Kennedy endorsed the idea. He wanted to avoid Brazilian anger at rising electric bills. "It's that damned U.S. company," he thought Brazilians would say when their monthly bills arrived.

Unfortunately for Brazil, Goulart's plan was shelved because of lack of internal political support for such an ambitious move. His next action was to order his finance minister to apply a limit on the amount of net profits that foreign companies would be allowed to take out of the country, and then he asserted control over foreign aid. Up to that point much of it was being poured into favored states within Brazil, but Goulart mandated that it must first be channeled through the federal government. These were all policies aimed at improving the general welfare of the Brazilian people, but they conflicted with the profit motives of the American Establishment.

Goulart also turned his attention to the United States' largest producer of iron ore, the M.A. Hanna Mining Company, that had a major presence in Brazil. Hanna was the main iron ore supplier of National Steel, which in turn supplied 40% of Chrysler Corporation's steel, and all three companies were highly invested in by the Rockefeller family. In 1962 President Goulart issued an expropriation decree against Hanna's iron ore concession. It was appealed in the Brazilian courts by Hanna's CEO George Humphrey, but by early 1964 it looked as if Goulart's decree would be passed. JFK was out of the way, and the time had come for the Establishment to act.

No time was wasted because Humphrey was a firm Establishment insider. He had previously been Eisenhower's Treasury secretary, and his company's law firm was Milbank and Tweed, the law firm of John J. McCloy. "The Chairman" then took control of the Goulart situation during the very same time that he was beginning his work with the Warren Commission on the JFK assassination. McCloy would work to cover up the successful American coup at the same time as he planned for a Brazilian coup, and as these two tasks began President Lyndon Johnson awarded him the Freedom Medal at a White House ceremony in the State Dining Room.

Biographer Kai Bird describes how McCloy took command,

McCloy quickly set about educating himself on the situation by seeing all the appropriate officials at the State Department, the World Bank, the IMF, and the CIA. As it happened, one of the men he had worked with in Germany after the war, Lincoln Gordon, was now the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil. Gordon was back in Washington temporarily that week and gave McCloy his own highly pessimistic assessment of the situation...

In preparation for the worst, McCloy set up a channel of communication between the CIA and Hanna's man, Buford [CEO Humphrey's assistant]. Thereafter, whenever Buford returned from one of his frequent trips to Rio de Janeiro, he would drive out to the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a debriefing. According to Buford, McCloy also arranged for him to meet periodically with the CIA station chief in Rio. "Through this fellow," recalled Buford, "we had many, many meetings with the military people who were opposing Goulart behind the scenes."

Bird relates that on February 28 McCloy flew out to Rio de Janeiro to meet with President Goulart. In his pocket he had two proposals to settle the dispute between Hanna Mining and the Brazilian government. Goulart readily agreed to both of the proposals and promised to set up a meeting between Hanna officials and government representatives to work out the deal. Goulart felt greatly relieved at this turn of events, but he had no way of knowing that the proposals were never meant to be lived up to. Several days later Goulart pressed on with his reforming agenda, announcing at a rally his plans to nationalize "all private oil refineries and some landholdings."

At the same time the powerful anti-Goulart opposition shifted into a higher gear. Demonstrations for and against Goulart took place throughout Brazil and tensions escalated. Bird writes,

Hanna officials were now very worried. Back in their Cleveland headquarters, Humphrey and Buford considered sending McCloy down to Rio once again. But McCloy knew from his contacts in the intelligence community that the time for deal making was over. On March 27, 1964, Colonel Walters cabled Washington that General Castello Branco had "finally accepted [the] leadership" of the anti-Goulart "plotters." Three days later, he told Ambassador Gordon that a military coup was "imminent." The following morning, Washington's contingency plan for a Brazilian coup, code-named Operation Brother Sam, was activated as a U.S. naval-carrier task force was ordered to station itself off the Brazilian coast. Well before the coup began, the Brazilian generals were told that the U.S. Navy would provide them with both arms and scarce oil.

The Goulart regime, however, collapsed so quickly that the protracted civil war predicted by the CIA on March 31 never developed. The generals who planned and executed the coup did not need the arms or oil supplies waiting for them off the coast. Hanna Mining Company, in fact, ended up giving the generals more direct assistance than did Operation Brother Sam. The initial army revolt occurred in Minais Gerais, the state in which Hanna had its mining concession. When these troops began marching on Rio, some of them rode in Hanna trucks. In Rio itself, Jack Buford was in constant touch with the local CIA station chief, who kept him informed by phone on Goulart's movements.

Throughout President Goulart's brief term he was continually labeled a "Communist" by much of the Brazilian elite, by a large segment of its military and by the Establishment-controlled mass media in the United States. The hysteria was so effective that a year later the House of Representatives took as credible the testimony of US Southern Command General Andrew O'Meara, who stated, "The coming to power of the Castelo Branco government in Brazil last April saved that country from an immediate dictatorship which could only have been followed by Communist domination."

http://www.redmoonrising.com/AmericanBabyl...m#Brazil%201964

Edited May 25, 2008 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[Tony Frank]

John J. McCloy was the perfect choice for the Warren Commission. Like Russell, Dulles, and Ford, McCloy would protect the CIA while the Commission carried out its cover-up task.

On April 2, 1953, barely six months after the Director of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, said that the CIA had been infiltrated, McCloy spoke to the State Chamber of Commerce in New York and told them that “abuse of Congressional investigating powers and processes was helping advance Communist aims by sowing unwarranted suspicion of the loyalty, integrity and competence of career officials.” He added that “large numbers of career officials commanded and deserved the highest respect and consideration.”

McCloy also stated, “I want to pay my tribute to the permanent Government official because I feel he is getting rather knocked about these days and an injustice is being done him and the indispensable service he performs.”

On October 28, 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy “singled out” John J. McCloy “in a speech attacking the ‘bleeding hearts’ who opposed his investigative methods.”

McCloy put forth his perspective a few weeks later on November 24, acknowledging that “there had been an ‘astounding’ number of dupes and traitors in the United States and remarked on the ‘casualness’ of prior administrations toward Communist infiltration.”

McCloy said that “the important thing now was to establish and maintain an affirmative program of world leadership.”

In January 1958, John J. McCloy was “a member of the Advisory Panel on the Gaither Report,” a report focused on the nation’s defense posture and on Soviet capabilities, and he made it clear that he was an elitist trustee of secrets. He said that he “felt that the campaign to induce President Eisenhower to publish the Gaither Report was ‘unfortunate’” and that “this country had placed ‘too great emphasis on secrecy for our own good.’”

McCloy deferred to the caretakers of clandestine matters, saying, “No really significant secrecy is going to be secret for more than twelve or eighteen months,” but it was a blatant contradiction in terms to claim that “really significant secrecy” would inherently be made public and imply that if something remained secret, then it wasn’t “really significant secrecy.”

The Gaither Report had been presented to the National Security Council on November 7, 1957, and two and half months later, McCloy “was less concerned with keeping the secrecy of matters in the report, he explained, than with preserving the President’s ‘very important prerogative’ of being able to consult privately any group he chose,” a prerogative that President Johnson exercised less than six years later when McCloy became part of Warren’s cover-up team.

President Kennedy, like President Eisenhower before him and President Johnson after him, enlisted McCloy as the head of a group that he would privately consult – Kennedy, when he exercised the “very important prerogative” after Soviet missile sites were discovered in Cuba.

The Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 15, 1962, and two weeks later, on October 29, 1962, President Kennedy established a special committee to deal with the crisis and appointed John J. McCloy to be the head of the committee.

Six days later, on November 4, 1962, “John J. McCloy, head of the United States coordinating committee on Cuba policy, and Vasily V. Kuznetsov, Premier Khrushchev’s special envoy, discussed the Cuban situation at Mr. McCloy’s home near Stamford, Connecticut.”

Sixteen days after McCloy met with Kuznetsov, the U.S. Naval blockade of Cuba ended, and everything was resolved peacefully.

McCloy was a natural choice for President Johnson when he appointed the cover-up team as they were ostensibly going to stave off the nuclear war that Johnson feared when he heard that Khrushchev and Castro were involved in President Kennedy’s assassination.

On December 10, 1963, less than two weeks after McCloy was appointed to the Warren Commission, a Washington Post article said that McCloy was “often a troubleshooter for American Presidents.”

In June 1967, McCloy, “in his first public comment on the investigation,” said that he thinks “the commission should have studied the photographs and X-rays taken of President Kennedy after his assassination.” He claimed that the Warren Commission had “all the facilities we needed” and “made its own choice not to subpoena the photographs.”

But contrary to McCloy’s claim about not looking at autopsy X-rays and photographs, a Secret Service document in 1966 stated, “The X-ray films were used for the briefing of the Warren Commission’s staff on the autopsy procedure and results . . . . Every item of tangible evidence which the Secret Service possessed relating to the assassination of President Kennedy was made available to the Warren Commission.”

During an Executive Session of the Warren Commission on January 21, 1964, McCloy himself confirmed that the Warren Commission was in possession of the autopsy photographs, stating, “They talk about the color photographs of the President’s body. Do we have those?”

Lee Rankin, the Commission’s General Counsel, replied, “Yes.”

McCloy then asked, “Are they here?”

Rankin replied, “Yes.”

In 1967, McCloy knew perfectly well that the Warren Commission had the autopsy photographs and didn’t have to subpoena them. But suppressing the autopsy photographs was critical to the cover-up, and McCloy knew that he had to make excuses for the Warren Commission.

McCloy claimed that they didn’t subpoena the autopsy photographs because, “We were perhaps a little oversensitive to what we understood were the sensitivities of the Kennedy family,” as though it made sense that in the course of investigating a Presidential assassination, they would refrain from obtaining the photographs and X-rays based on such bizarre logic.

It seems as though the Kennedy family was used as an excuse on a regular basis.

During Jim Garrison’s 1969 prosecution of Clay Shaw, Colonel Pierre Finck, one of the pathologists at President Kennedy’s autopsy, claimed that he refrained from dissecting Kennedy’s neck to trace the path of the bullet that entered the back and allegedly exited the throat because “the family wanted no examination of the neck organs,” as if within ten or twelve hours of President Kennedy’s horridly violent and bloody assassination, the Kennedy family actually said something about not wanting the neck organs examined.

Dr. Finck had the same story when he appeared before the House Assassinations Committee in 1978, testifying that “family wishes” precluded him from dissecting Kennedy’s neck. The Committee, however, stated that it was Dr. James Humes, the head pathologist, “who made the decision not to dissect the back entry wound.”

Dr. Finck also told the House Assassinations Committee that when he appeared before the Warren Commission back in 1964, Arlen Specter told him that Attorney General Robert Kennedy “did not want the X ray films and photographs introduced in the hearings of the Warren Commission,” as if President Kennedy’s own brother, the Attorney General of the United States, did not want the Warren Commission to see the autopsy photographs when it investigated the President’s assassination.

A 1966 FBI memorandum, noted in Chapter 5, states, “The Secret Service specifically claims that Bobby Kennedy had gotten in touch with that agency and had given specific instructions that the autopsy report, as well as photographs, were not to be released.”

The memorandum also states, “The FBI was precluded from disclosing in its preliminary report to the Commission, because of the desires of the Kennedy family, any information concerning the actual autopsy report.” (The Kennedy family didn’t want the FBI to tell the Warren Commission anything about the autopsy report?)

Dr. Humes testified to the Medical Panel of the House Assassinations Committee that the pathologists were being “urged to expedite” the autopsy and get it done “as quickly as possible.” He stated that they were being rushed because “members of the President’s family were in the building,” and they “refused to leave the premises until the President’s body was ready to be moved.” This caused some unknown person or persons who were present in the autopsy room to “harass us and cause difficulty,” he said.

Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas medical examiner, told the Journal of the American Medical Association that when Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman was attempting to illegally remove President Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital, “He appealed for sympathy to Mrs. Kennedy.”

Jack Ruby claimed that he killed Oswald so that Mrs. Kennedy would not have to “return to Dallas” for “a long and lengthy trial.”

McCloy was obviously toeing the line when he lied about not looking at the autopsy photographs and X-rays and claimed that they refrained from doing so because they were “oversensitive” to the “sensitivities of the Kennedy family.”

Given all of the statements that were made, one would think that the Kennedy family was responsible for the entire cover-up.

In an Executive Session on December 16, 1963, which was held more than two months before any witness testimony was taken, members of the Warren Commission discussed President Kennedy having been shot from the front.

Warren Commission member Gerald Ford stated, “But that person must have taken the shot over here some place.”

John McCloy, in referring to President Kennedy being shot from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, responded to Ford: “Still I don’t see how he could have been hit in the front from here.” Hale Boggs then stated, “That’s the big question, yes.”

Then McCloy stated, “I inquired about this and they said that nobody was permitted on the overpass.”

After McCloy wondered how President Kennedy “could have been hit in the front from here,” and after McCloy mentioned the “overpass” that was in front of President Kennedy, McCloy made a statement about the sixth-floor window from which Oswald allegedly fired, and it is clear that McCloy knew that President Kennedy was shot from the front.

McCloy stated, “I think we ought to take a look at the grounds and somebody ought to do it. And get the picture of this angle to see if it is humanly possible for him to have been hit in the front from a shot fired from that window. Maybe it is.”

If it had been a clear case of President Kennedy being shot from behind, there would have been no reason for McCloy to refer to the sixth-floor window and ask “if it is humanly possible for him to have been hit in the front from a shot fired from that window,” and he would have no reason to say, “I don’t see how he could have been hit in the front from here.” McCloy would have no reason to bring up “the overpass” that was in front of President Kennedy when he was assassinated.

McCloy, the troubleshooter for American Presidents, was apparently given to acknowledging the truth when he felt pressured to do so (acknowledging infiltration, dupes, traitors, and secrecy), and then making excuses with a “that’s all behind us now” attitude. But McCloy, of course, was never under any pressure to tell the American people that the Warren Commission knew that President Kennedy was shot from the front. And McCloy lied when he said that they did not look at the autopsy photographs and X-rays.

President Johnson’s initial fear of a nuclear war dictated that the Warren Commission must not tell the American people about any evidence that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, and John J. McCloy definitely had an all-around unique perspective that added to his unique qualifications for Warren’s cover-up team.

[William Kelly]

Prior to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor very few people knew of the existance of Friedman's group of Codebreakers working within the Old Munitions Building in Washington DC. Under the direction of the Army Signal Corp the "Magic" intercepts were arguably (along with the development of the Atomic Bomb) the most guarded secretes of World War II.

Of the handful of persons (some suggest less than one dozen) who were allowed access to this infromation in pre December 1941, John J. McCloy's (future Warren Commissioner) name stands out. Brought into the War Department by Secretary Stimson, McCloy was tasked with the development of a modern intelligence organization for the Army. His career in government would become of historic interest for many reasons.

McCloy was a primary player in the relocation of Japanese Americans during the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor (as was Earl Warren). In 1981 and again in 1984 McCloy testified before Congress about his role in the decission making process associated with this relocation. His testimony in 1984 suggested that, based upon "Magic" intercepts, Japanese-Americans might belong to organized cells designed to spy on the United States. If nothing else this admission underlines the fact that McCloy was aware of and reading the "Magic" intercepts which were translated from Japanese by none other than John B. Hurt.

John B. Hurt was a member of the Magic team whose name I came accross inpendently while researching the military career of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker then again (years later) while researching the career of General Maxwell Taylor.

It seems that John J. McCloy is also, in perhaps a very significant way, associated with this same John B. Hurt.

Coincidence?

Jim Root

Jim,

In his book Echo from Dealey Plaza, former SS agent Abraham Bolden relates an incident that reinforces the idea that LHO tried to contact a John "Hurd," though Bolden doesn't seem to be aware of the attempted phone call.

Bolden says (p. 53):

"...I was the night duty agent that week in November, which meant that all calls that came in to our office after working hours were routed to my home phone. Two night after the events in Dallas, I received a call from SAIC Forrest Sorrels of the Dallas office at about 10:00 PM,...Sorrels said he was in the Dallas police station and that he and Inspector Kelly had interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald, who had mentioned the name John Hurd."

"'I don't know if it's spelled H e a r d, H u r d, H e r d, or H u r t. I'm giving you the phonetic sound,' he explained. 'I want yo to tell Martineau to drop everything he's doing out there and put every agent possible on tracking down anyone who has the name John Hurd. This is top priority and we need to get this done as soon as possible....'"

That's it.

But that's interesting, isn't it?

BK

Edited June 19, 2008 by William Kelly