Jim DiEugenio - Before I get started I was talking with Bill Simpich yesterday, and a couple of people have mentioned this "Man in Mexico," photograph, the man in Mexico photograph, he has been identified, and it is in the Lopez report. And the significance of that is that Lopez and Hardway prove, I think, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Ann Goodpasture knew who he was before she sent the picture up. In other words, it was deliberately meant to mislead. And the reason she did it was because it came much closer to matching the false description of Oswald, the six foot guy with the athletic build. And that’s why she did it. They prove that she even manipulated the record in order to say [that] the photograph was taken on a certain day which it was not. But, remember as Bugliosi says, ‘The Lopez report is a giant dud.’
The topic of my talk today is, “Historical Revisionism and the JFK Case.” Why did I choose that title? Well, first of all because I have an MA in History, and I was seriously considering getting a Ph.D. but decided not to, and also because I think that there is a problem that has continually plagued the JFK research community almost from the beginning, that is as Jim Garrison once noted in his book, the issue of the false sponsors, the diversions. And in the last few months, we have done some, several reviews by myself and Seamus Coogan that have I guess you would say have raised some controversy in the field on works by people like John Hankey, and Russ Baker, and Seamus’ article about Alex Jones.
I was really surprised at the intensity of this reaction, especially the stuff about Baker’s book. So, I tried, patiently, to answer each question about this that they emailed in, and I tried also to answer this on Len’s show, Black Op Radio, but, it’s one of those things that convinced me to deliver this talk. Purely speaking, revisionism means that you draw a reinterpretation of some kind of historical event in such a way that it alters the traditional view of that event which historians have handed down from generation to generation. You see, one of the things that people don’t understand about academia, and historians in general is that there is almost as much pressure to conform in academia as there is in the mainstream press, for a lot of different reasons which I won’t go into here. But, this pressure does exist. And it’s usually the more traditional people like say Ambrose, or McCullough who get the career advancement. If you tow the line you get the advancement. If you don’t tow the line you become a bigger controversy.
And there’s many examples of revisionism. You can go back, all the way back to Spengler’s “Decline of the West,” which changed the way we looked at certain concepts. Another example of revisionism, of course, would be Jim Hougan’s brilliant and revolutionary book about Watergate, “Secret Agenda,” which completely altered at least, well, my view, and many others views, of what happened, and exposed The Washington Post and Bob Woodward to be at best propagandists, at worse, well, I won’t go further than that.
Now in this field I guess the best example of historical revisionism is John Newman’s masterful book, “JFK and Vietnam.” And that is a book whose affects on the literature about Vietnam are still being felt to this day. He essentially, he ushered in a whole new small bookshelf of people who followed him, who now see the prime event in the expansion of the Vietnam war as the assassination of President Kennedy. And I’m sure you’re familiar with the Gordon Goldstein book “Lessons in Disaster, ” David Kaiser’s book, “American Tragedy,” the Howard Jones book, “Death of a Generation,” these are all essentially, on (not 100% sure of the wording there) “Virtual JFK.”
And by the way I should say that John, although you won’t see his name in McNamara’s book, was responsible for McNamara’s book. McNamara called him in and interviewed him and talked about the book several times. And I said, John, why does a guy who was there have to interview you? And he said, well, he has a really bad memory. And I said, how could he have a really bad memory? And he said, Jim, if you were responsible for the death of 2 million people you’d have a hard time remembering it too. So, he’s also responsible, in a way for, “In Retrospect.”
Now what defines the concept of revisionism is, of course, tradition. In the subject of Vietnam the traditional way to look at that was mapped out by David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest,” which tried to depict that conflict as inevitable tragedy, one that America really could not avoid. John Newman’s book changed that. And it made the very forceful argument that yes Vietnam could have been avoided if President Kennedy had not been assassinated. Or as John once said to Warren Hinkle, “show me Kennedy’s plan for winning the war and I’ll believe you.” Well, LBJ had one in four months after taking office. Kennedy never developed one in three years. So, John ‘s book superseded, and kind of made “the Best,” if you ask me, it made “The Best and the Brightest,” into a kind of historical artifact, something to look back on, not forward to.
But, the reason John’s book did that is, number one, it clearly recognized the tradition that it was countering. Number two, it clearly delineated the difference between the two policies. Number three it clearly showed how fast the switch occurred. By the way, if you read his book, how fast did the switch occur? In 48 hours. Number four, it introduced convincing new evidence to prove his thesis. And number five it showed where there had been indications in the past that this had been the case, that other people had overlooked.
Now it is not easy to write historical revisionism such as this. That is why it took John ten years to write his book. Because John’s book was so convincing, and was so well done, I think we are all the better for it. I think its always good when you clear up mythology from the past.
By the way, how many people know that “Lessons from Disaster,” was passed around the Obama administration before the decision to go into Afghanistan was made. Yes, it was. The guys who didn’t want to go passed that book around. Obviously, it didn’t work.
And so for me “JFK and Vietnam,” was a model of first class historical scholarship in search of the true facts about a controversial subject. Now I mentioned the word tradition previously and how revisionism is based upon tradition but also something that finds its roots in a part of the tradition that was overlooked. So, to make this point as soundly as I can, you know, my minor in college was English and one of my favorite critics was T.S. Eliot and he wrote a book, or rather an essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he argued that it was all right to be revolutionary, it was all right to find new styles to express yourself but when it came time to evaluating a work of art you had to place it in an historical context. You had to explain to this person where this thing came from or you weren’t a very good critic. And so I think that kind of parallel applies to this case.
Well, this is the proper background to explain this subject that I am going to address today for from the near beginning of the Kennedy assassination there have been attempts to be novel, to be daring, to be revolutionary, in order to somehow explain something important that everybody missed. Or at times to even explain what actually happened in Dealey Plaza. Now some of these attempts have just been misguided. Some of them I don’t think have been very innocent . But, they have been attempts in my view to mislead, and confuse, and to muddy the waters.
Now, since someone asked about “Farewell America,” that is what I am first going to talk about. “Farewell America,” was introduced, supposedly done by French intelligence at the time of the Jim Garrison investigation, and was actually mailed to his office. And I did a long review of this book on Rich Dellarossa’s website. If you haven’t read the book, in short, it’s the first book to put forward in any kind of detailed and long way this whole idea of the Texas connection. He calls it “The Committee,” that of these Texas billionaires, or millionaires, whatever you want to call it who somehow sponsored the Kennedy assassination. What’s very interesting about the book is that the first half of the book does not tell you about that. It’s in the second half of the book that he brings this in. And the first half of the book is actually pretty good. It’s the second half of the book that is really sketchy and shady, and almost mystical. So, when I was analyzing this I said I believe the first half of the book is a set up to dull you into the second half of the book.
Well, Garrison was actually really tantalized by the book. And so what happened is he, as a good investigator does, he did everything he could to find out where it came from. So, I interviewed Lou Ivon and Harold Weisberg about this thing since they were part of the investigation to find out where this thing came from. Now, the titular author of the book, I mean as everybody knows that "James Hepburn" is not really a person. He’s the name of the guy on the book. James Hepburn’s real name was Herve Lemarre. And Garrison found this guy, brought him down to New Orleans, and interviewed him several times. It turns out Herve Lemarre is not the guy who wrote the book. This gets to be a shell, inside of a shell, inside of a shell, finding out the mystery of who really wrote this book.
Well, what happened is that finally, and Garrison, you know, one of the real tragedies of this case is that it’s so hard to find Garrison’s files. So, I found, well I didn’t find the actual files but I actually found a summary sheet of his investigation of “Farewell America.” And it turned out that the guy who really wrote the book is a guy nobody had ever heard of, Philippe de Vasjoly. Philippe de Vasjoly was a former agent of the [The Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage] SDECE which is the French intelligence. He had been kicked out of French intelligence because he had been suspected of being a double agent. Does anybody know who he was a double agent for?
Audience member - Angleton?
Jim DiEugenio - James Angleton. And so it started out that de Vasjoly actually supervised the writing of “Farewell America.” Now, of course, in 1968 very few people knew that James Angleton was running Oswald, but if Garrison would have known that he probably would have arrested Herve Lemarre. So, this is the first example of what I call these diversions that enter the JFK case. And by the way, to this day people swear by this book, “Farewell America,” without knowing it was written as a project to James Angleton.
Now, the second book, oh, by the way, Ivon got so mad at Herve LeMarre for lying to him that he actually physically threw him out of Garrison’s office.
The second book I studied in this regard is not really a book, and contrary to its title it’s not really a document. It’s really a long essay, written, supposedly written by two Secret Service agents and sent to some Texan lawyer. The proper title is “Nomenclature of an assassination cabal,” popularly known as “The Torbit Document,” after the lawyer whose office it was sent to.
And by the way, when I first started coming to these things back in? When was the first A.S.K. conference? 1991? Yes, 1991. Everybody had this thing, everybody had this Torbit document. It was really hot. The whole so called secret of the assassination was supposed to be here, it was all, you know, don’t read any books, here it is.
So, I also did an extended analysis of this on Rich’s website, and I came to the same conclusion I did with “Farewell America,” that it was pure bunk. That it was pure disinformation, except it was a different form of disinformation. If you closely examine the Torbit essay you will notice something quite odd, it accuses everybody and their mother of being involved in the Kennedy assassination, the Pentagon, the mafia, the FBI, the DIA, something called DISC, ( which is not a CD, ) LBJ, Texas millionaires\billionaires, everybody, except the CIA. Everybody except the CIA is in this document!
So, in fact, when it does discuss somebody who is a CIA agent, like Clay Shaw, it doesn’t call him a CIA agent, it calls him a military intelligence agent, which was true, but only for four years. After Shaw got out of the military he became a CIA agent for a long, long time.
Now, many of the footnotes, and this is a dead giveaway, this, for anybody who knows Garrison’s stuff, which very few people do, this is a dead giveaway about the Torbit document. If you read the footnotes whenever he says something very controversial or outlandish, what does the footnote say? Files of the New Orleans D.A. Well, I am one of the very few people who have looked through the files of the New Orleans D.A. and I can tell you this is complete crap! This stuff is not in there, at least not the stuff that I have seen. So, to me this is a dead giveaway to the Torbit document.
Now, what was the purpose of these two disinformation tricks? In my opinion they both have to do with the destruction of Jim Garrison. The first part I believe was part of the CIA’s campaign directed out of Angleton’s office to mislead Garrison and send him down a wrong trip. And by the way, the effort out of Angleton’s office to crush Garrison was quite extensive. It started quite early in 1967 when they had their first meeting in which I think it’s Ray Rocca who says if we don’t do anything about this guy Clay Shaw is going to be convicted. It actually says that in black and white in the CIA documents. You’ll see it on the ABC special next week. [RIF# 104-10428-10023]
And the second, “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal” I believe was meant to muddy the waters in the wake of the Garrison investigation by deliberately lying about the contents of his files. And it as meant to do two things, number one, to imply that the CIA was not actually involved in the case, and number two, to throw out a whole laundry list of other suspects, including, if you can believe it, but it’s there, Roy Cohn was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination. Roy Cohn did an awful lot of things, I’ve never seen anything that implicates him with the Kennedy case.
Now the unfortunate thing about “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal” is this, that they succeeded. That essay, like I said, became the Holy Grail for a lot of people in the JFK community. And it stayed that way for quite a long time. Secondly, it did provide a rather long list, myriad list of other suspects that people eagerly took up after. And I actually think you can divine the influence of “Nomenclature,” in a few writers including Peter Dale Scott.
Now the next diversionary tactic, I believe, was performed by Bob Blakey. If you read [Gaeton] Fonzi’s excellent book, “The Last Investigation,” you will see that he says, from [being there] up close and personal that Blakey’s object was to impress upon the collective imagination of America the influence of the mob in Kennedy’s death. And he sparred no effort or opportunity to do so. And again, unfortunately, he was successful. Because he had a platform, and a big name the influence of Bob Blakey became rather difficult to overstate. We got these books by Dan Moldea, [ and] John Davis. Jonathan Whitney did a PBS special. Several other writers like Mark North continue to write in this vein, topped off by Frank Ragano, and Tom Hartman and Lamar Waldron.
But today, the really odd thing is if you look at the declassified files of the House Select Committee you can see just how empty of real evidence Blakey had in this category. And how he actually reversed the evidentiary trail behind people like Guy Bannister and David Ferrie in order to give his theory a viability it really doesn’t have on its own.
Now this brings us to the present, or at least contemporary times. You know, due to Stone’s movie over a million, or two million documents have now been declassified. [Well, I think it’s more accurate to say about 5 to 6 million pages.] And PROBE was one of the very few publications that actually did a lot of work trying to get these new documents out. And there have been a lot of good books based upon these documents like “Breach of Trust,” “Let Justice Be Done,” and “JFK: And the Unspeakable,” are just a few.
Now in light of these books let us return to the idea of tradition. These books I believe follow in that line, that is they build upon a foundation that has already been established, a foundation of good information. And they use this information in its purest state without spinning it through a blender. Now this does not mean that you have to be obedient to any kind of tradition but if you break away from that tradition you have to have a solid basis to do it with, you know, the old Carl Sagan line, “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,” if not, it’s just a claim. And in it’s worst state it’s just cheap sensationalism.
So, let us take up three instances of revisionism of recent vintage in the JFK case. In order they will be “Family of Secrets,” “Ultimate Sacrifice,” and the film “JFK II,” now called “Dark Legacy.” Now I am briefly going to consider a man who provides a megaphone for some of this stuff, Alex Jones, and briefly mention a comparison of him with the other alternative we have today, the so called Liberal blogosphere.
[In ] No review I wrote did I [ever] meet with more vocal and violent disagreement than my critique of Baker’s book. I was even accused of covering up for George Bush, which to me is out of left field. I mean, I think George Bush should be in jail. But, not for what Baker wrote about. He should be in jail for his role in the Iran-Conta affair, the October surprise, and all of this stuff that they didn’t get to, like the drug running, and his mini-Operation Phoenix [program] against the Sandanistas. So, to say that I am covering-up for George Bush is just ridiculous. But that’s how attached people got to “Family of Secrets.” So, since I did not see how Baker had in any way proven his case in that regard I did not understand the logic of this charge. In fact, I felt that Baker never proved any of his sensational charges against Bush 41. For instance, and this is one error in the book that I really can’t believe Baker made and that nobody picked up on. In the book it says that George Bush was enlisted into Moongoose in the late 1950’s. Now anybody who knows anything about this case knows that Mongoose didn’t start until 1962 when they sent [Ted] Shackley down to JM/WAVE. So, how could, how come nobody noticed that? Moongoose did not begin under Eisenhower. It began as a reaction to the failure of the Bay of Pigs under Kennedy. Now you can say that the Bay of Pigs started under Eisenhower. But, that is not Moongoose. And I’ve got all these people trying to get that point, well C was part of the Bay of Pigs, well C was part of the assassination. Look, you can go for continuity in many different ways but to me that’s just screwing things up. If we are ever going to be precise about this case we have to know what the hell we’re talking about. Moongoose was Moongoose. Moongoose was not the Bay of Pigs.
And Baker’s evidence in regard to Bush’s alleged role in the Kennedy assassination I thought was pretty much of the same quality. Barbara Bush writing a letter to her family about hearing about JFK’s death at a hairdresser, this somehow becomes a cover story devised later. To disguise what I don’t know. Was Baker saying that Barbara Bush was involved?
George de Mohrenschildt knew Bush from his old geology days. The fact that de Mohrenschildt was interviewed by the CIA before he went to Haiti and did not tell him [Bush] about his acquaintance with Oswald, or about the upcoming coup attempt in Haiti, this somehow became suspicious, as if de Mohrenschildt was supposed to tell these guys about his role escorting Oswald around, or the upcoming coup. In my opinion de Mohrenschildt didn’t even know what he was doing with Oswald. And he didn’t know until after the fact.
Bush told the FBI he would be staying in Dallas overnight on the 22nd. And this was on the 21st when he said that. He ended up not doing so. Again, in “Family of Secrets” this becomes suspicious. If I’m campaigning for the senate and I’m trying to win this race why would you stay in Dallas on the 22nd after what happened in Dealey Plaza? Do you really think anyone is going to be paying any attention to you?
Now I don’t even want to talk about what Baker did with the Thomas Parrot story. Suffice it to say that what he appears to have done is [to] embellish it, and to leave out key points in order to make it something that it is not, that is Bush’s assistant providing some kind of alibi which Parrot didn’t need because he already had an alibi. And in my view “Family of Secret,” is like this throughout, except for one part, the good part of the book is the part where he talks about Bush 43 and the Texas Air National Guard. That is a good part, and valuable part of the book. But, the rest of it, which is about 90% of the book I think is essentially journalistic gymnastics to disguise a simple fact, that he has no evidence to implicate Bush in the JFK case.
All right, let’s go to “Ultimate Sacrifice.” Now this is a book that I was not even going to review. But, Jim Douglass called me up and asked me to. So, when you write a book like “JFK and the Unspeakable,” you have my ear. Now the problems I have with this book were kind of simple. Why would Kennedy plan an invasion of Cuba for the Fall of 1963 when he would not invade the island during the disastrous Bay of Pigs, when he was under immense pressure to do so? Or during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he was under even more immense pressure to do so? And further, in 1963, if you read the Douglass book, Kennedy had been working for about 11 months on developing a detente with Castro, something which, of course, Fidel was almost overjoyed about saying that Kennedy would now go down in history as the greatest president since Lincoln. If you weren’t going to invade Cuba under that kind of pressure then it wasn’t going to happen. And another I don’t understand is how this invasion was going to occur in two weeks [when] Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara didn’t know about it, but Jack Ruby did? When was Kennedy going to tell McNamara? The morning of?
Then, of course there were these meetings that he discusses, in which somehow Richard Helms knew about the invasion but McNamara did not. But, then if Helms knew about it why wouild he try and sucker Kennedy with this fake arms cache which he says that the CIA found in Venezuela only 12 days before this so called C day was going to happen, which I didn’t think made any sense at all. But, then again why would the mob try to kill Kennedy and probably eliminate their last chance to get back their casinos in Cuba? That’s another thing I didn’t think was explained.
But, let me conclude with a comparison between Baker and “Ultimate Sacrifice.” Like I said, I think Baker jumbled up the whole Thomas Parrot story. The reason why Jim Douglass wanted me to read “Ultimate Sacrifice,” is because he [Douglass] had a copy of Edwin Black’s absolutely remarkable, fantastic essay first published in the Chicago reader in 1975. Does everybody know what I am talking about? The plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago? It’s on Len [Osanic]’s website. And it is an absolutely stunning piece of work about the Chicago [ plot ]; in fact I think it was the only long essay ever written about the Chicago plot at that time. So, Jim actually went to Chicago and he hunted this thing down in the basement of some obscure library. And he sent it to me. And so, of course, I read it and then I compared what is in “Ultimate Sacrifice,” to what was in the essay. And I was, it’s really kind of surprising. The most grievous exception was the fact that Hartmann and Waldron left out what I thought was a bombshell in the Black essay, namely, that the code name of the informant who tipped off the Secret Service about the plot was “Lee.” I guess that’s not important enough to mention. They also left out the character of Thomas Vallee, who was the designated patsy in the Chicago plot. And, if you don’t know, the resemblances between Oswald and Thomas Vallee are very, very close. And in fact if the Secret Service had not covered up the Chicago plot, I believe the Dallas assassination would not have happened because Vallee so much resembled Oswald, down to being a former Marine, who had worked with former Cuban exiles, who had some anti-social tendencies, etc., because I think Oswald would have been picked up in advance. And also because the actual design of the plot was so much like what happened in Dallas I believe the motorcade route would have been altered. In other words, what happened in Dallas would not have happened if the Chicago plot had not been covered up. That’s how good Black’s essay is. And if you haven’t read “JFK and the Unspeakable,” Jim actually went up there and he said, he actually went to the place where Vallee was working and there’s very little difference between that little scene and what happened in Dealey Plaza. And, of course, if Abraham Bolden had not been falsely imprisoned his testimony would have sunk the Warren Commission. And I believe that is why he was falsely accused and placed in jail.
All right, now let’s go to John Hankey’s “Dark Legacy,” formerly called “JFK II.” This film has so many problems [with it] I could be up here for two or three hours and everybody would be throwing tomatoes at me at the end, it’s impossible to correct them all. Suffice it to say that when you say Delphine Roberts saw Oswald at the Lake Pontchartrain training camp [then] you didn’t do your homework. When you say that somehow Prescott Bush was actually running the CIA when Allen Dulles was its director then you haven’t studied any of the histories of the CIA, or any biographies of Allen Dulles. If there’s one person who created the CIA as we know it it’s Allen Dulles. And if there’s one person who revolutionized the CIA once he was its director it was Allen Dulles. When you have Howard Hunt working for Nixon in the White House when he was actually sent there as a CIA agent to overthrow the Nixon presidency then you haven’t read “Secret Agenda.” And when you say that the code name for the Bay of Pigs which was Operation Zapata was named after some boat then you obviously have not read any of the studies of the Bay of Pigs because the peninsula right next to the Bay of Pigs was called the Zapata peninsula. And the whole film is like that. So, what does Hankey have on George Bush? Well, Skull & Bones, and he milks that for all it’s worth. And then he tries to get every last drop out of the famous Hoover memorandum written about by Joseph McBride in The Nation back in 1988. But, at the same time he does something really, really odd. He tries to make J. Edgar Hoover into some hero and some kind of crack investigator. You know why? Because Hoover discovered that some bank Prescott Bush was associated with was sending funds to the Third Reich . Well, if you counted every trade company, and every business, and every bank that did business with the Third Reich leading up to 1941 you’d have about half the millionaires in this country under arrest.
And those two facts lead to one of the most unbelievable, over-the-top climaxes in both film history and JFK assassination [research] history when George Bush goes into Hoover’s office with some Cuban thugs and threatens him [Hoover] with a poison flechette gun. Why, I don’t know. But, it makes for some humorous theatre of the absurd which is up there with [Eugene] Ionesco.
Now, that I have summarized some of the dubious worth of these works let me go back to my original point. New and original work must be judged by the standards of the past, things that have been established by fact, and which are essentially not arguable. If not, then the new work, and this is what [T.S.] Eliot was talking about, then it exists in a vacuum, which in my view these work do. They exist in some neither world.
No one ever has said anything that I know of and I’ve read I think as many books as anybody else about the involvement of George Bush in the Kennedy assassination prior to the publication of the McBride articles. Does anybody know? And I mean that is quite a long period of time. That’s 25 years. And somehow everybody overlooked this? Sylvia Meagher didn’t notice? Harold Weisberg didn’t notice? George Michael Evica didn’t notice? Jim Lesar didn’t notice?
Now who had postulated a mob plot based on AM/WORLD before “Ultimate Sacrifice?” And like I said, where there is an extraordinary claim there has to be extraordinary evidence. And in my view it’s no surprise that one of the backers of Hankey and Baker is Alex Jones, because if you listen to Alex Jones he knows very little about the JFK case. I mean, this is a guy who fell for Barr McClellan’s book [Blood, Money and Power], to the point that he once said that if JFK had not been killed in the kill zone LBJ was ready to call in a hit team via helicopters to finish the job, which, of course, is kind of ridiculous, and it’s the kind of thing that makes us look silly.
You see, one of the problems I perceive in this regard is that the critical community has a kind of inferiority complex, which I think is understandable because we’ve been marginalized by the mainstream media, been ridiculed by people like Posner, Epstein, and Bugliosi and therefore we underestimate, or don’t understand the real value of the achievements that we have made. But, if you take a look in the face of the opposition, they are quite amazing. I mean just consider this, by 1967 the Warren Commission was dead and buried. And this was done by people, individual citizens like Tink Thompson, Sylvia Meagher, Mark Lane, and Harold Weisberg, the chicken farmer. They did what the Warren Commission could not do. Sylvia Meagher, this is an amazing achievement, actually did a subject index to the Warren Commission on paper, before computers, that’s 19,000 pages!
Jim Garrison exposed the prime suspect in the case, the CIA. And he exposed Oswald for what he was which was an agent provacateur. And he revealed this whole New Orleans underworld, this network, that was manipulating Oswald in the summer of 1963.
Later, people have exposed the Mexico City charade; the obviously curtailed autopsy; the roles of Ruth and Michael Paine; and those of people like David Phillips and Jim Angleton. And make no mistake, the Warren Commission knew precisely what it was doing.
How many people have heard of Allen Dulles’ meeting with Harry Truman in ‘64? Okay, not very many people, so, this is new. Everybody knows that Truman wrote an article for The Washington Post, I think it was in December of 1963, sorely lamenting what the CIA had become. And that the CIA had become something he never envisioned when he went ahead and signed the documents to make it into a reality. Well, he got a lot of praise for this. But, there was one person who didn’t like the article, and this one person happened to be on the Warren Commission at the time. And his name was Allen Dulles. And Allen Dulles went out to visit Truman in Missouri, I think, in April of 1964. And he had about a half an hour conversation. He had two of his assistants with him. He told them to go outside and watch traffic. And he went inside to Truman’s living room, and he [Dulles] tried to convince him [Truman] that what he said was wrong, that somehow he did envision overthrowing Arbenz. That he did envision overthrowing Mosaddegh. I almost want to add that he did envision killing Kennedy.
Well, the timing of the essay is very interesting because although it was published on December 22nd, or 21st, he started working on it on December the 1st, 9 days after the assassination. I ask you coincidence or conspiracy?
So, Dulles tried to talk him out of this. And he actually wrote a memo on this where he actually said that Truman had reconsidered his position. Well, this, of course, is nothing but BS because if he would have reconsidered his position Dulles would not have written a letter to CIA saying I want Helms, I want four other people, I want maybe McCone to go out there and talk to this guy. And Truman would not have written a letter to LOOK magazine saying that the Thomas Wise excerpt in the summer of 1964 did not tell the whole story about how bad the CIA had become.
But, the really interesting thing about this visit is that as Dulles is leaving, one of the last things he says to Truman is, you know, those articles by people like [Richard] Starnes and Arthur Krock about the CIA somehow battling Kennedy over Vietnam, you know, Kennedy denied those before he died. This was an absolutely stunning statement, because Truman didn’t bring it up, Dulles did. And it’s more BS. Kennedy never denied it. In fact, John Newman thinks he [JFK] was the source for those articles. But for somebody on the Warren Commision to bring that up, at that early, because nobody, nobody, had connected those dots in April of 1964. So, how did Dulles connect them?
So, that, in my opinion, that crystalizes, just how bad, to have this guy on the Warren Commission is, [ it's ] absolutely ridiculous.
So, this stuff that I’ve talked about, to me, this kind of stuff is real evidence. This is the kind of stuff you can submit to a prosecutor. David Ferrie [went] looking for his picture with Oswald on the evening of November 24th, going around to certain houses of people who were in the CAP with him and Oswald, do you have any pictures? Even if the guy is not there he asks the wife if he can look through his things. Do you have that picture of me and Oswald?
Or Clay Shaw calling Dean Andrews to defend Oswald on the 23rd.
Ruth Paine, I don’t know how many people know this ‘cause I didn’t know this until [I read] Armstrong’s book. The Imperial Reflex camera was not found by the Dallas Police in either [of the two] investigation(s) of Ruth Pane’s home. There were three cameras found, none of those were the Imperial Reflex camera. So, how did the Imperial Reflex camera come into evidence? Well, how did everything against Oswald come into evidence? Ruth Paine miraculously found this camera 9 days later. But, guess what? She doesn’t give it to the FBI. She doesn’t give it to the Dallas police. She gives it to Robert Oswald. Why? Because Marina is going to be going over there later and she can have a good look at this camera and replenish her memory. And then she changes her story. And said, oh, no, it was an Imperial Reflex camera. Even though she, how many people know this? When the House Select Committee interviewed Marina they tested her on this Imperial Reflex camera. They asked her a very simple question, when you use this camera, how did you use it? Did you raise it up to your eye or did you look at it down at it at your waist? If you’re old enough, you know about these cameras, I know about these cameras. They were normally held at your waist [ level] and you looked through a view finder like this (indicating.) In this case, you look at the view finder like this (indicating.) Marina said she had it up to her eye. How could you possibly not remember something like that? But, she didn’t. And this is why the people on the House Select Committee, not Blakely, because everybody knows Blakey and Billings rewrote the report after everyone was gone. This is why they said we have some real problems with this woman. And they wrote a 29 page essay on the contradictions of Marina Oswald and why she was not a credible witness, especially with the Walker shooting.
John Stringer, here’s some more real evidence, I’d say I took some shots at Doug Horne’s book but I think there’s some stuff of real value in the book. And there’s a really remarkable chapter in volume three. John Stringer was a photographer for the autopsy. So, Jeremy Gunn and Horne bring him into the archives and they show him pictures of the brain. And Stringer’s reaction is really something. He’s looking at this, and he’s looking at this, and then he looks at the pictures and he looks at the numbers, and then he goes wait a minute, this was done with a press pack. I didn’t use a press pack when I took these pictures. And he says I didn’t use this film either. This is Ansco. I never used that film, and he essentially denied that he took those pictures. Now Doug builds upon this and he builds a very solid case that there is no way in the world that those pictures are of Kennedy’s brain. And believe me when you read the transcript of Stringer, his rather mystified reaction to this, you couldn’t find a better witness than this guy, to say somehow this autopsy was more than bungled, somebody did some sabotage on this. So, the question then becomes why?
Or John Newman’s great achievement about James Angleton splitting up Oswald’s 201 file on the eve of the Mexico City charade so that certain information about Oswald would only be known to him [ Angleton ], and he [ Angleton } would be misleading everybody else.
See, to me this is real evidence. Barbara Bush writing this note for her family, is to me it’s not evidence. Now some of these people are still alive, Ruth and Michael Paine; [Buell] Wesley Frazier, who I believe is a very suspicious character which I have been writing about, you know, the whole curtain rod story, which I think doesn’t hold water; people like Gerald Hill, John Stringer, and Ann Goodpasture, when I was talking with Simpich; when I interviewed Eddie Lopez, this is a really funny story, when I first read the Lopez report, you know that over blown piece of malarky as Bugliosi says, I first encountered this woman’s name, and I’m reading this thing, and reading this thing, and I’m going, god, how could anybody have overlooked this woman, she did a lot of really bad things, like lying to Hardway and Lopez, so when I interviewed Ed Lopez, I said, Eddie, who is Ann Goodpasture? And this is the very first thing out of his mouth, “She’s a conniving lying bitch and if there was any justice in this world she’d be in jail.” I said, "But, Eddie who is she? I didn’t ask what you thought of her, who is the woman, I’ve never heard of her before." And he says she took care of Phillips’ operations because Phillips was almost never there in Mexico City. He was always flying around to JM/WAVE or Langley so she handled his operations. So, if you put that together with the fact that she deliberately sent this wrong picture up to CIA HQ and the fact that Phillips sent the transcripts, which Tarasoff did not recognize as being written on his typewriter, to himself under an assumed name, then you know why the picture is there and why the transcripts were not typed up by Tarasoff.
So, there are people like Ann Goodpasture, Pierre Fink, Thorton Boswell, so I believe, these kinds of cases, and this kind of evidence is really valuable stuff. And there is a pretty good parallel for presenting a case on this and that, of course, is the Jowers vs King civil suit. I don’t know how many people read about that but there is a transcript of it called “The Thirteenth Juror,” the book, “The Thirteenth Juror,” in which justice was done, however late, however delayed, but it was done. And a jury of 12 normal people said there was a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King.
But, on the other hand what could a prosecutor do with Baker’s work, which leads to an important point. At this stage of the game, 47 years after the fact, I don't want to know whose name you are, or who you’re accusing, or what your mystifying plot is, I want to know one thing, what is your evidence? That’s it. That’s the bottom line in this case today. What is your evidence? And let everybody decide. And don’t write 900 pages, or in Bugliosi’s case 2700 telling me what the evidence is or what the evidence isn’t. If you have to write a book that long you really don’t have that much to say. Jim Douglass’ book is less than 400 pages long. Phil Melanson’s book is 214 pages long, and it’s one of the most valuable books ever written on this case. Why could he get along with 200 pages when other people need 900, to say much less?
And let me add another thing, one of the most discouraging things about this is this, the bottom line, everybody and their mother did not kill John F Kennedy. If you read these books and take them seriously everybody and their mother did. It’s almost like people are still remembering “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal.” To say that George Bush, LBJ, the mob, the Cubans, H. L. Hunt, Murchinson, and even the latest, the employees of the Texas School Book Depository were part of a plot, I call that one the Truly Gang Theory, they all killed Kennedy, is for me to say nobody killed Kennedy. The only thing worse than saying that Oswald killed Kennedy, or that Oswald killed Tippit, or that Oswald took a shot at Walker, which he did not, is to present a picture to the public resembling the Torbit document, where no suspect is left out. It’s just silly.
One of the things that Jim Garrison did that was immediately buried when Blakey came in is he wrote a remarkable letter, a really wise and prescient letter to Jonathan Blackmer, who was a lawyer designated by Bob Tannenbaum to run the New Orleans investigation and in this letter he warned Blackmer that you could not rely on the usual investigative techniques to solve this case because the crime scene evidence used to indict Oswald in both the Tippit murder and the Kennedy murder was so suspect that it would be demolished in court if you had to actually go by the real rules of evidence which, of course, the Warren Commission did not, but it would never stand up under cross-examination. Therefore, the way to solve the case was you had to find a paradigm that would be justified internally by the evidence yet the overall design would fit the shape of the plot. Now, what did he mean by that? He meant this, Johnnie Roselli did not control Ruth and Michael Paine, George Bush did not stop Jim Humes from dissecting the neck wound, Felipe Vidal [Santiago] and John Martino did not fake the pictures of Kennedy’s brain, LBJ did not send a picture of a KGB agent to CIA HQ in order to match a false description, H. L. Hunt did not provide that very long piece of paper that was taken down by the police at the TSBD which the only way Frazier could have had under his arm was if he was King Kong, and he did not produce a rifle that Oswald never ordered. How many of you know that? The so called rifle “found” in the Texas School Book Depository does not match the order form either in length or in style. This is a point that David Belin if you read the testimony on this issue tried to keep out of the record. It does not match. It is something that has never been explained. And Roy Truly did not escort Oswald around the Clinton / Jackson area [of Louisiana] in August of 1963.
So, Garrison concluded that if your paradigm did not fit these circumstances then you had to revise it until it did. And that was the only way that you would solve this case. Now I actually believe it’s possible to do this today, in other words, to present a comprehensive and cohesive case that fits these circumstances. And we have to, unlike what Baker said last year that to give the case currency you had to read his book I believe the best evidence to give this case currency is what has happened to this country. Again, I’m old enough to have been around back then when Kennedy was president. The United States isn’t anything like it was back then. When Kennedy, probably the best line in Manchester’s whole book, when Kennedy arrives in Dallas he says we’re really in nut country now. Well, the nuts have taken over. The teabaggers have taken over the country. And it would not have happened if the JFK case had not occurred. Because the JFK case enabled the following assassinations, of King, and RFK. And that resulted in the coming of power of Richard Nixon and the eventual decline of this country, socially, economically, and politically. Now this is a message you won’t find on the so called Liberal blogosphere, like Daily Kos, and Huffingtonpost, etc. In fact, they’ve been given instructions to keep the conspiracy stuff out. Unless this country ever develops a media that is going to be honest about its past it will never be able to solve the problems of the present. And unless we, the JFK case, stay on our guard we run the risk of what happened to the 9/11 movement. I don’t know if you’re familiar with people like Judy Wood, and Morgan Reynolds, and John Lear etc. But, it is one of the things that marginalized them in world record time. So, we can’t let our guard down and we can’t succumb to sensationalism. We have the proper data and background in our grasp, all we need is the opportunity. And sooner or later when things get bad enough which they are well on their way to being bad enough we are going to be needed and we have to be ready. Okay?
Thank you.
(applause)
Questions?
Jim DiEugenio - Casey?
Casey Quinlan - Yeah, Jim, where did you say that you had access to, was it Edwin, Edwin Black’s essay? Is that online?
Jim DiEugenio - Oh, it’s on Len Osanic’s website. He has it in a .pdf that you can download.
Casey Quinlan - Thank you.
Jim DiEugenio - Okay
Robert Morrow - Hey, Jim. Fantastic talk today, I really appreciate that. Hey, about your point about false sponsors and about how everybody and their mother couldn’t have killed John Kennedy? That’s a good point, but there are a lot of suspicious characters, including George Herbert Walker Bush-
Jim DiEugenio - Okay, let me revise that. Because this is a point that people went after Stone on. See, there is a difference between a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the cover-up that took place after. I am not saying everybody and thier mother wasn’t involved in the cover-up, because I think everybody and their mother was involved in the cover-up. They were. There is no way you can look at that evidence and not say that J. Edgar Hoover was in this up to his eyebrows. And there is no way that it becomes an institutional memory within the CIA and the FBI to keep the cover-up intact. So, let me say this, there is a difference in what happens before November 22nd and what happens afterward. I should have made that point but that is what I mean. I’m not saying that other people weren’t involved in the cover-up, because they obviously were.
Robert Morrow - [He is not about to believe the entire point of Jim’s presentation. Morrow has swallowed the whole George Herbert Walker Bush was involved in the assassinaziton of JFK story and wants to debate that with Jim.]
Point well taken. Regarding George Bush I’m going to list some facts that you already know about, that as being a devil’s advocate, this is Robert Morrow, Austin, Texas, I’m just going to list a few of them, you mentioned Ted Shackley, Opertion Moongoose, 1962, correct? He later became a speech writer for George Herbert Walker Bush in 1980, okay? That picture of Edward Lansdale at the Texas School Book Depository-
Jim DiEugenio - There is not a picture of Lansdale at the Texas School Book Depository-
Robert Morrow - Well, we’ll-
Jim Dieugenio - There is a picture of the back of his head.
Robert Murrow - which was identified by Fletcher Prouty-
Jim DiEugenio - Right.
Robert Murrow - and Victor Krulak, two people who worked closely with Ed Lansdale, unlike me or anybody else. The book, “Barry and the Boys,” by Daniel Hopsicker I think is an incredibly important book, just the photo on the cover. And who is on the cover of that book right there? People like Felix Rodriguez, who may have been involved in Operation 40, back in the early 60’s, later running drugs with Bush and the Clintons in the 1980’s, Porter Goss, later became CIA director
Randy Owen - (obviously frustrated with this rambling nonsense) Uh, do youi have a question, Robert? I’m sorry but I want to wrap this up so we stay on time.
Robert Morrow - Well, you know, I mean, uh, I’m just saying that as far as Bush being an elite sponsor of the JFK assassination, it’s very possible.
Jim DiEugenio - Is Larry here? Okay, I don’t have his permission but I’m going to tell this story anyway when Baker was here last year he and Larry went out for breakfast or something, and Baker said something to Larry in private, which is not in his book but this is what he said, you know something Larry, I think that George Bush took over the operational opportunities and coordinator for the Kennedy assassination on the 21st. And Larry said, you know, Russ, if you believe that I think you really underestimate who people like David Morales, David Phillips, and Mitch Werbel really were. The idea that this guy, this newly elected Republican chairperson of Tarrant county was somehow going to muscle in on somebody like David Morales, if that would have happened George Bush would have been in a garbage can across the Trinity river. So, this kind of stuff, and this is what I’m talking about. You have to go by the historical tradition, if you don’t, you’re lost, because it all gets confusing.
Ed Sherry - “Farewell America,” was held up in Canada for years and years. There was an embargo on it. But, yet, Bill Turner, Special Agent Bill Turner, I believe got it reprinted a few years ago. It sold on Ebay for $100, the original one. Bill’s version sold for 17 dollars, now it’s way up high. Can you explain that?
Jim DiEugenio - I disagree with Bill on that, and I’ve told him head on. I know Bill, I like Bill. I think Bill’s done a lot of really good work. I think he’s dead wrong about this. He was involved in the importation of the book when he was working for Random House. And he values the book very highly. I don’t, for the reasons I’ve stated. I don’t think Bill has seen those kind of files that Garrison had, which I saw the summary of, and I think if you analyze the book, and I’ve noticed Bill doesn’t believe in the Texas Connection, Bill believes that the plots against Castro were reversed, and that the CIA and the mob killed Kennedy. So, I don’t understand why he still supports the book.
What a great presentation Jim! Thank you Joe for putting up the transcript. Those interested in buying the DVD can go here: http://www.jfklancer.com/catalog/nidmedia/Dallas10.html
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