The Communication Breakdown

[Ron Ecker]

Tim Carroll kindly sent me the following excerpt from McNamara's book In Retrospect, pp. 89-90:

"On Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, as President Kennedy rode to a speaking engagement in Dallas, I met in a conference room adjoining my Pentagon office with my senior associates, Mac Bundy, Kermit Gordon of the Budget Bureau, and science adviser Jerome Wiesner. We were reviewing the defense budget that the White House had planned to submit to Congress in January. This budget review was part of my effort to define department objectives and make certain that they would be coordinated with the president's foreign policy goals. After the meeting, I planned to fly up to Hyannis Port with Joint Chiefs Chairman Max Taylor to present my proposals to the president over the Thanksgiving weekend.

In the midst of our discussion - at about 2:00 P.M. - my secretary informed me of an urgent, personal telephone call. I left the conference room and took it alone in my office. It was Bobby Kennedy, even more lonely and distant than usual. He told me simply and quietly that the president had been shot.

I was stunned. Slowly, I walked back to the conference room and, barely controlling my voice, reported the news to the group. Strange as it may sound, we did not disperse: we were in such shock that we simply did not know what to do. So, as best as we could, we resumed our deliberations.

A second call from Bobby came about forty-five minutes later. The president was dead. Our meeting immediately adjourned amid tears and stunned silence.

Not knowing what had prompted the assassination or what might follow, I met immediately with the Joint Chiefs. We agreed U.S. military forces worldwide should be placed on alert, a standard procedure in times of crisis. A few minutes later, Bobby called again. He asked Max and me to accompany him, later in the afternoon, to nearby Andrews Air Force Base to meet the plane returning his brother's body."

Calling James Richards. Do you (or does anyone) have a photo from Andrews that might show Taylor among the people assembled when AF1 returned?

Ron

[James Richards]

Hi Ron,

I don't have that many images taken at Andrews but the ones I do have don't show Taylor or McNamara for that matter.

James

[David G. Healy]

Ron wrote:

[...]

One other thought. If Taylor was in Dallas and his presence had come to light, he had a legitimate excuse to use for being there.

[...]

_____________

Hi Ron,

I'm not sure, I do think your checking this out in the correct fashion, via immediate post assassination moves made by the Sect'y of Defense and with whom. I can't believe (which doesn't make it true) the Sect'y of Defense would NOTknow where his uniformed sidekick was, 24/7.

[Ron Ecker]

David,

I agree that most Defense Secretaries would know where the Chairman was 24/7. (Rumsfeld is a known exception. Right after the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon didn't even know where Rumsfeld was, and had not even informed the Acting Chairman that America was under attack.) If Taylor was in Dallas, McNamara was obviously party to a false cover story.

I've never looked at McNamara as a suspect, but if the assassination was a military/intelligence operation, I see no reason why McNamara would be above suspicion, other than the plausible proposition that he had no need to know.

Ron

[James Richards]

Ron,

Guys like McNamara may not have had anything to with what happened in Dallas or indeed possess any knowledge what-so-ever regarding the assassination plot itself. Personally, I feel the tentacles of conspiracy did not extend a great deal into the sitting government.

It is conceivable though that incredible pressure was brought to bear to follow a script after the fact. If a popular President could be brutally slain on the streets of a modern American city then the message was very clear, everyone could be got to.

James

[Ron Ecker]

Tim Carroll has pointed out a couple of interesting things about this line from McNamara's book:

After the meeting, I planned to fly up to Hyannis Port with Joint Chiefs Chairman Max Taylor to present my proposals to the president over the Thanksgiving weekend.

First, JFK was supposed to stay at the LBJ ranch. Second, Thanksgiving was still a week away. To which I would add, why would they take up JFK's "holiday" weekend with the budget instead of the urgently held Honolulu Conference that McNamara and Taylor had just returned from on the fate of South Vietnam?

Did McNamara come up with this scenario, along with the bit about Taylor going with him to Andrews, as a way of emphasizing Taylor's presence? A lot of cover stories don't stand up to much scrutiny, and this may be one of them.

Ron

[Mark Stapleton]

Tim Carroll has pointed out a couple of interesting things about this line from McNamara's book:

After the meeting, I planned to fly up to Hyannis Port with Joint Chiefs Chairman Max Taylor to present my proposals to the president over the Thanksgiving weekend.

First, JFK was supposed to stay at the LBJ ranch. Second, Thanksgiving was still a week away. To which I would add, why would they take up JFK's "holiday" weekend with the budget instead of the urgently held Honolulu Conference that McNamara and Taylor had just returned from on the fate of South Vietnam?

Did McNamara come up with this scenario, along with the bit about Taylor going with him to Andrews, as a way of emphasizing Taylor's presence? A lot of cover stories don't stand up to much scrutiny, and this may be one of them.

Ron

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ron,

I like your line of thinking here. We may have to realise that commonly accepted facts concerning such things as persons' whereabouts might require another look. I always regarded Manchester as a chronological bible but if Taylor was in Dallas, then it's wrong. Ditto McNamara's book. He may have been "advised" to skate around the critical points in time and come up with a different but plausible story. Widespread poetic license?

[Ron Ecker]

I’ve searched what sources I have on Maxwell Taylor’s supposed presence at Andrews on the arrival of AF1 from Dallas. As you’ll recall, the official story, told in Manchester, is that Taylor and the other JCS were meeting in the Pentagon that day with West German officers. We also know from both Manchester and McNamara’s account that McNamara met with the JCS after the news came from Dallas. These stories are at least misleading in that Curtis LeMay, as we learn in his biography Iron Eagle, was in Michigan on 11/22. Manchester goes into considerable detail about the JCS sessions with the West Germans, yet fails to comment on the absence of the JCS’s most notorious member.

McNamara says that RFK called him after the murder and asked that he and Taylor accompany him to Andrews. Both Manchester and the biography RFK by C. David Heymann agree that RFK, McNamara, and Taylor went together to Andrews. McNamara is likely the original source of this information. (In Evan Thomas’s biography Robert Kennedy: His Life, there is no mention of how or with whom RFK went to Andrews.) McNamara of course is also the source of the story that he and Taylor had planned to go later that day to Hyannis Port for the Thanksgiving weekend to talk budget with JFK, even though it wasn’t Thanksgiving weekend and JFK had planned to spend the morning of 11/23 at LBJ’s ranch, meaning he couldn’t possibly get to Hyannis Port before mid or late afternoon that Saturday. (So what was the point of this illogical Thanksgiving tale, other than to reiterate Taylor's presence?)

Yet at Andrews, Taylor disappears. In all the sources I have, only Manchester retains him, but only as something of a specter: “In Taylor’s words, he ‘wandered about aimlessly, thinking gloomy thoughts’.” Taylor is nowhere at the scene in the news coverage compiled in President Kennedy Has Been Shot, nor in Jim Bishop’s account (indeed he is mentioned nowhere in Bishop's book). The sources tell us that LBJ at Andrews asked McNamara, Bundy, and undersecretary of state George Ball to go with him to the White House. We are told that various officials, including McNamara, Earl Warren, and Arthur Schlesinger, shook Johnson’s hand at Andrews, and that Mike Mansfield, while comforting a weeping Mrs. Mansfield, gave LBJ a nod. But by all accounts, at Andrews the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Johnson did not even acknowledge each other.

Ron

Edited June 28, 2005 by Ron Ecker

[Mark Stapleton]

I’ve searched what sources I have on Maxwell Taylor’s supposed presence at Andrews on the arrival of AF1 from Dallas. As you’ll recall, the official story, told in Manchester, is that Taylor and the other JCS were meeting in the Pentagon that day with West German officers. We also know from both Manchester and McNamara’s account that McNamara met with the JCS after the news came from Dallas. These stories are at least misleading in that Curtis LeMay, as we learn in his biography Iron Eagle, was in Michigan on 11/22. Manchester goes into considerable detail about the JCS sessions with the West Germans, yet fails to comment on the absence of the JCS’s most notorious member.

McNamara says that RFK called him after the murder and asked that he and Taylor accompany him to Andrews. Both Manchester and the biography RFK by C. David Heymann agree that RFK, McNamara, and Taylor went together to Andrews. McNamara is likely the original source of this information. (In Evan Thomas’s biography Robert Kennedy: His Life, there is no mention of how or with whom RFK went to Andrews.) McNamara of course is also the source of the story that he and Taylor had planned to go later that day to Hyannis Port for the Thanksgiving weekend to talk budget with JFK, even though it wasn’t Thanksgiving weekend and JFK had planned to spend the morning of 11/23 at LBJ’s ranch, meaning he couldn’t possibly get to Hyannis Port before mid or late afternoon that Saturday. (So what was the point of this illogical Thanksgiving tale, other than to reiterate Taylor's presence?)

Yet at Andrews, Taylor disappears. In all the sources I have, only Manchester retains him, but only as something of a specter: “In Taylor’s words, he ‘wandered about aimlessly, thinking gloomy thoughts’.” Taylor is nowhere at the scene in the news coverage compiled in President Kennedy Has Been Shot, nor in Jim Bishop’s account (indeed he is mentioned nowhere in Bishops’ book). The sources tell us that LBJ at Andrews asked McNamara, Bundy, and undersecretary of state George Ball to go with him to the White House. We are told that various officials, including McNamara, Earl Warren, and Arthur Schlesinger, shook Johnson’s hand at Andrews, and that Mike Mansfield, while comforting a weeping Mrs. Mansfield, gave LBJ a nod. But by all accounts, at Andrews the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Johnson did not even acknowledge each other.

Ron

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ron,

Great work. Suddenly it's looking like Taylor might not have been in Washington. Up to now, I had never considered McNamara could be implicated but maybe he was in the loop also. Wonder what Jim Root thinks of this?

I might be reading too much into it, but is there a touch of symbolism in LBJ specifically asking the Secretary of State and his Undersecretary to accompany him up to the White House? There's a passage in Manchester in which someone asks McGeorge Bundy about the State Department, to which Bundy curtly replies "State is making its own arrangements". I always thought Manchester slipped there, telling readers a little more than they were meant to know.

BTW, is there any way of determining who LeMay visited in Michigan? Relatives maybe, but the man who pulled Gerald Ford's strings lived in Michigan--Detroit billionaire Max Fisher. I believe he's still there, now about 95 yo.

[Ron Ecker]

BTW, is there any way of determining who LeMay visited in Michigan? Relatives maybe, but the man who pulled Gerald Ford's strings lived in Michigan--Detroit billionaire Max Fisher.

Mark,

Coincidentally, between my last post and yours, I received my used copy of Mission with LeMay: My Story, by Curtis LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor.

It's a 581-page autobiography. There is not a word in it about the JFK assassination.

That says a lot about LeMay, but I'm surprised that an author of Kantor's stature would leave such a relevant, important, and interesting subject out of a book with his name on it.

Before tossing the book into the box for recycling, I tried to find anything in it about Michigan. LeMay and his wife were both from Ohio, but his wife was a graduate of the University of Michigan. Max Fisher was not in the index.

Ron

Edited June 28, 2005 by Ron Ecker

[Dawn Meredith]

The two Kennedy biographers who were "present at the creation" (so to speak) were Sorenson and Scheslinger, but particularly Sorenson.

But apparently you lack the time to read Sorenson's biography of Kennedy.  I understand it is easier, and probably more fun, to post sarcasm about me but let me respectfully suggest that reading will increase your knowledge while posting your irrelevancies accomplishes nothing.

I just find it incredible that someone can claim to be an "assassination researcher" without having read the basic books on the Kennedy administration by those who were involved with it.  I suspect this would also surprise many other people who have "done their homework".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think all that John should require is that to post on a thread you ADD to it, not take it over with your own personal agenda. For some reason I had not read anything on this thread and last night read most of it. When going from day to day with posts, Tim's same old gets annoying, but when attempting to read a long thread from start to finish in one sitting, and having to consistently "go around" these annoying posts they take on a whole new sense of insidiousness.

I have come to the conclusion that this is TIm's whole deal: take over the conversation, break up the dialogue, stear it back to Castro. In short don't let the information build, but keep having to come back to discussions of English grammer, libel suits over your opinion, and of course, that Castro really did do this.

I found my self getting very peeved at this last night. It seemed so obvious that this was very staged. Kudos to the other posters here for not letting yourselves be pulled into these diversions for too long, but kept gettig back to the thread itself.

I now see Tim's presence here in a more sinister light. I do not think he cares at all who killed JFK. He's got his fall back CIA position and so long as he just spreads this over and over he achieves his clear purpose: hyjacking every thread to become a personal argument with him, or inserting his right wing view. What EVER the subject he changes it and brings it back to his one mantra.

I no longer see this as merely "an honest disagreement".

Dawn

[Mark Stapleton]

The two Kennedy biographers who were "present at the creation" (so to speak) were Sorenson and Scheslinger, but particularly Sorenson.

But apparently you lack the time to read Sorenson's biography of Kennedy.  I understand it is easier, and probably more fun, to post sarcasm about me but let me respectfully suggest that reading will increase your knowledge while posting your irrelevancies accomplishes nothing.

I just find it incredible that someone can claim to be an "assassination researcher" without having read the basic books on the Kennedy administration by those who were involved with it.  I suspect this would also surprise many other people who have "done their homework".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think all that John should require is that to post on a thread you ADD to it, not take it over with your own personal agenda. For some reason I had not read anything on this thread and last night read most of it. When going from day to day with posts, Tim's same old gets annoying, but when attempting to read a long thread from start to finish in one sitting, and having to consistently "go around" these annoying posts they take on a whole new sense of insidiousness.

I have come to the conclusion that this is TIm's whole deal: take over the conversation, break up the dialogue, stear it back to Castro. In short don't let the information build, but keep having to come back to discussions of English grammer, libel suits over your opinion, and of course, that Castro really did do this.

I found my self getting very peeved at this last night. It seemed so obvious that this was very staged. Kudos to the other posters here for not letting yourselves be pulled into these diversions for too long, but kept gettig back to the thread itself.

I now see Tim's presence here in a more sinister light. I do not think he cares at all who killed JFK. He's got his fall back CIA position and so long as he just spreads this over and over he achieves his clear purpose: hyjacking every thread to become a personal argument with him, or inserting his right wing view. What EVER the subject he changes it and brings it back to his one mantra.

I no longer see this as merely "an honest disagreement".

Dawn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Dawn,

Bullseye!

[Mark Stapleton]

BTW, is there any way of determining who LeMay visited in Michigan? Relatives maybe, but the man who pulled Gerald Ford's strings lived in Michigan--Detroit billionaire Max Fisher.

Mark,

Coincidentally, between my last post and yours, I received my used copy of Mission with LeMay: My Story, by Curtis LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor.

It's a 581-page autobiography. There is not a word in it about the JFK assassination.

That says a lot about LeMay, but I'm surprised that an author of Kantor's stature would leave such a relevant, important, and interesting subject out of a book with his name on it.

Before tossing the book into the box for recycling, I tried to find anything in it about Michigan. LeMay and his wife were both from Ohio, but his wife was a graduate of the University of Michigan. Max Fisher was not in the index.

Ron

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ron,

I might be overestimating its importance, but I think this is quite significant. No-one has Taylor in photographs of Andrews airfield, McNamara's explanation is faulty and Manchester is given to lapses in detail re Lemay and occasionally uses poetic license. Moreover, there's a photo of a man walking past the tramps who (from behind) looks remarkably like Taylor. I'd love to know where Jim Root places Taylor on the 22nd.

p.s. don't throw out LeMay's bio--it would be interesting to know what his opinions of various politicians were.

[Ron Ecker]

I'd love to know where Jim Root places Taylor on the 22nd.

Me too.

[Ron Ecker]

I now have a copy of the book An American Soldier: The Wars of General Maxwell Taylor, by his son John M. Taylor. There are a couple of things immediately worth noting. First, the question of whether Taylor ever wore glasses. At least some researchers are of the opinion that the man who looks like Taylor in the tramp photo is wearing glasses. I'm not convinced that he is. In any case, among the several photos of Taylor in An American Soldier, there is one of him wearing glasses. He is outside in Vietnam, and there’s the illusion that it could be sunglasses, because the left lens (he is seen in left profile) looks black. But the right lens looks clear like normal glasses. I have seen this effect before in photos, the one that comes to mind being of Robertson’s friend as they are crossing toward Elm Street. His glasses look like normal glasses at Main and Houston, but in the photo of him approaching Elm both lenses look blackened out.

Second, this is the book from which the quote came that I posted earlier about Taylor breaking down, a year after the assassination, in an interview. In looking at that passage in the book, I find that it is immediately followed by the description of a similar incident, over 10 years later, this one at which his son the author was apparently present (p. 291):

“More than a decade later, at a family dinner, the subject turned to political dissent in the country under Nixon. Taylor had recently returned from a speaking engagement at a small New Jersey college, where hecklers had prevented him from speaking. He commented that Kennedy, had he lived, was the one person who might have preserved a degree of national cohesiveness. Then his voice broke; it was a moment before his normal self-control returned. Surrounded by his family, he had let his defenses down.”

Ron