Christopher Fulton: I received a phone call and heard the distinguished voice of Mr. Warren P. Weitman Jr. “Mr. Fulton, thank you for the book you sent documenting President Kennedy’s Cartier wristwatch. After careful review by several heads of departments, we’ve come to the conclusion that Sotheby’s would love to sell it privately for you, but we will require your legal release before we can contact the Kennedy family. Once we have a confidentiality agreement in place we can proceed. We’ve already prepared the release; all we require is your signature.” “Of course,” I said, “but there must be several stipulations: one, nobody but the immediate family of JFK is to see the information; two, my name is not to be shared with anyone without my prior written permission; and three, the evaluation material I sent you is to be retained by you and returned to me at the close of the transaction, with no copies made.” I thought if the family requested any further information or documents, we could draw up a contract specifying the care that would require. “Consider it done,” Weitman said. “I’ll have the release faxed to you within the hour. Thank you, Mr. Fulton.” I was concerned about how the Kennedys would react. I was in a difficult position, but if the sale proceeded, the watch would find its proper place and I could get on with my life. Once the agreement arrived, I signed it and sent it back for Weitman’s counter signature, along with a personal letter I had written for JFK Jr.
It read: "First, let me congratulate you on your marriage; I wish you nothing but happiness. I want to inform you that my corporation has acquired a personal item that belonged to your father, through his late secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. The auction Sotheby’s held on behalf of your mother was so well done that I want to sell the item in my possession to your family through them. I want no publicity, so we have signed non-disclosure agreements. The item in discussion is the documented Cartier wristwatch your father wore on Dallas November 22. Because of the highly personal nature of this piece, I wanted to contact you personally. I suggest that 15% of the proceeds be given to the JFK library, and another 10% to a cause of your choice. Your concerns and/or suggestions are encouraged and appreciated. If you are not interested in purchasing this item, I would like Sotheby’s to sell it publicly. If you are adamantly opposed to a public sale, please write a letter to Sotheby’s stating your feelings as such, and I will honor your wishes. Thank you, and best to you and your wife." Janet Reno explained: “We didn’t put an injunction on the auction because Robert White, the main consigner, cooperated with us, signed our agreement, and relinquished the items we requested and JFK Jr. told us he would secure Fulton’s evidence for the National Archives. Ted Kennedy was concerned about JFK Jr.’s involvement, so we had a sealed indictment and warrant ready for Fulton when he came into the country; we were going to arrest him at the airport in New York before his transaction with JFK Jr. took place.” I knew extradition was a very expensive and complicated political undertaking, something that would make headlines. I was in a lot of trouble if the U.S. Government wanted me this badly. It must be about the evidence, and my meeting with John Kennedy Jr. “I sold physical and documentary evidence in JFK’s assassination, evidence Bobby Kennedy had collected and withheld from the government in the ’60’s. I gave a private interview to John F. Kennedy Jr. in Florida for an exposé about it. It’s going to run in George magazine.” While I was in Florida with John Jr., he told me Robert White had been under investigation by the FBI for obtaining items of national security that were willed to him by President Kennedy’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln.
I was still trying to come to terms with what the Federal Government had done to my life. Now I lamented the loss of John Jr., for myself and for the country; we’d all had something precious stolen from us. The next days I operated like a robot, performing my meaningless duties within the federal labor camp. I listened to the radio and I understood there hadn’t been a real search and rescue for days after they were reported missing. Then the military took over the investigation, and on the sixth day, the bodies were recovered. The United States Government and military had spearheaded the investigation, and it took six days to find the plane and recover the bodies just off the coast. The reports said John was reckless, that it was pilot error and he was responsible for the crash. I knew it wasn’t true. I heard excerpts of Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for John; the words rang in my ears for days: “John F. Kennedy Jr. had only just begun, there was in him a great promise of things to come.” John Jr. was eliminated before he could expose the lies in his father’s murder and the hardships of Robert Kennedy, Robert Bouck, Angela Novello, and Evelyn Lincoln in their courageous efforts to secure and preserve the truth. There would be no story at all, except the story of another dead Kennedy. Fidel Castro addressed his people on a broadcast that was displayed on every television and radio in Cuba. “I have sad news to tell you tonight; a fine young American, along with his wife and sister-in-law, has died in a plane crash into the ocean. His name is John Kennedy Jr., the promising son of the former President of the United States. John Jr.was my friend, and Cuba’s friend; I will miss him, and I will always wonder about what greatness we have lost but will never realize. I don’t cry, but I've cried today.” These truths were not just Bobby Kennedy’s mantle, or Evelyn Lincoln’s or John Jr.’s, or even Robert White’s or mine; they belonged to the country. They belonged to all of us. —The Inheritance: Poisoned Fruit of JFK's Assassination (2018) by Christopher Fulton
David Heymann has faked interviews in his books. First of all, the fact Heymann has done this is beyond dispute. I myself demonstrated several instances in which this had happened. David Cay Johnston exposed Heymann in Newsweek, 2014, in "Getting Away With Literary Fraud": "Heymann was a fraud, and his biographies of high profile people are filled with sensationalized falsehoods and flat-out lies. John Simkin somehow missed, or deliberately ignored all this. Secondly, the idea that this would somehow eliminate Heymann from being published is preposterous. Everyone in this field--except Simkin--knows that any author who writes a hatchet job on the Kennedys gets welcomed with open arms into the publishing world. And their work is never questioned. Which is how Heymann gets away with it. This of course is because the political/economic milieu today favors the practice. Harris Wofford in his book
Of Kennedy and Kings wrote about this phenomenon. Publishing houses asked him to add some dirt to the book or they wouldn't publish it. Conservatives and Republicans did not like JFK, because he was thoughtful. Their favorite weapon against him was their account of his love life, which according to them involved Mafia molls and Marilyn Monroe. They must have worked themselves into fits of envy over Marilyn Monroe, the hottest woman of her time. Unlike most presidents, Kennedy was able to break with the conventional thinking of the time. From his experience with the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Joint Chiefs’ “Operaton Northwoods,” Kennedy concluded that CIA Director Allen Dulles and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lemnitzer were both crazed by anti-communism and were a danger to Americans and the world. But the point is, because Kennedy's foreign policy and his civil rights program contrasted with Eisenhower, it was part of the new excitement of the early sixties. Kennedy had promised to get the country moving again with his New Frontier speech at his nominating convention. And this became a part of the trajectory of that fateful decade. One that began with so much expectation and hope. Yet it ended with tens of thousands of body bags returned from Indochina, blood in the streets of Chicago, and LSD supplied by the CIA. The end was captured symbolically by the stoned out acid rock of Woodstock.
Robert Dallek has no sensitivity to any of this. Or President Kennedy's role in it. For many years–actually decades–Vietnam had been saddled with the subtitle of being McNamara's War. In other words, contrary to what Dallek is postulating, many observers saw it as a war that McNamara actually advocated. During the debates about inserting combat troops in 1961, McNamara was one of the many who advised Kennedy to do so. Many of the president's advisers-e.g. Rostow, Taylor, Ambassador Nolting, Ed Lansdale, and Deputy Defense Secretary Alexis Johnson – wanted him to insert combat troops into Vietnam in 1961. It was Kennedy who rejected each proposal. As Goldstein notes, only two men backed Kennedy in arguing against Americanizing the war: George Ball and John Kenneth Galbraith. They were outnumbered by a factor of about 3 to 1. In May of 1963, there was a meeting in Hawaii with McNamara. At this meeting, McNamara reiterated he wanted the plans speeded up. The documents on this meeting, declassified in 1997, were one of the key finds released by the ARRB.
Begrudgingly, Dallek admits "Kennedy began planning the withdrawal of U.S. military advisers in May of 1963." (
An Unfinished Life, p. 668) What shows Kennedy was genuine in his new approach was the fact that he put Dick Goodwin and Adolf Berle in charge of the new policy formation. Goodwin was a liberal Harvard lawyer, congressional investigator and speechwriter. Berle had been a member of the FDR Brain Trust, and was assistant secretary for Latin America from 1938-44. Berle was very much for moving economic development forward in the southern hemisphere. Goodwin asked for input from Latin American academics in Washington. In his appointment of Douglas Dillon to Treasury, Kennedy was making the usual blow to Wall Street. Walter Heller, one of the most noted Keynesian scholars of his time, found Kennedy very interested in the economy, and the forces which drove it. Kennedy was determined to expand "the Nation's investment in physical and human resources, and in science and technology." Or, as Donald Gibson notes in his long analysis of Kennedy's economic program, "Kennedy consistently used his office in an attempt to inject growth-oriented planning into government policy." Also, Kennedy had an interest in fostering progressive governments in the Third World. In US Steel's Chairman Roger Blough's eyes, Kennedy's agreement with US Steel reminded him of Roosevelt's New Deal planning.
Source: kennedysandking.com
No comments :
Post a Comment