WEIRDLAND: Marilyn Monroe's "Niagara" Auction, Dismantling the Kennedy myths

Sunday, August 02, 2020

Marilyn Monroe's "Niagara" Auction, Dismantling the Kennedy myths

Marilyn Monroe's time behind-the-scenes of the 1953 film, "Niagara," was captured by a photographer, and his huge set of photographic negatives is up for grabs... but it won't come cheap. The pics -- 227 total, 198 of which depict Marilyn -- were snapped by Canadian journalist and photog Jock Carroll in 1952, while she was preparing for her first top billing as Rose Loomis in the noir thriller. The set of photos is mostly comprised of black-and-white negatives but includes some color positive transparencies. And, along with shots of Monroe, there are several of the sets, scenery and of course Niagara Falls. The negatives could become much more than just a collector's item too... because they include the copyright to the images. Carroll signed the rights over to his son before he died, and the son will grant them to the buyer. Regardless, whoever ultimately gets their hands on the MM pics will have to drop a lot of cash... the folks at RR Auction say they're expected to haul in around $50,000. Source: www.tmz.com

"Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President’s, was mourned as an extension of the evils of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random… What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America." ~ Congressman Allard Lowenstein

As everyone knows by now, the whole Marilyn Monroe angle blew up in Seymour Hersh's face. When Hersh had to reluctantly admit on ABC that he had been deceived, he did it on the same spot where Anthony Summers and Sylvia Chase had played martyrs for the tabloid cause. On September 25th, Peter Jennings narrated the opening segment of that program. Hersh appeared only briefly on the segment. He was on screen less than 10% of the time. The main focus was on the forensic debunking of the documents (which we now know was underplayed by ABC.) Jennings cornered Lex Cusack, the man who "found" the papers in the files of his late father who was an attorney. From published accounts, the documents were supposedly signed by five people: JFK, RFK, Marilyn Monroe, Janet DesRosiers (Joe Kennedy's assistant) and Aaron Frosch (Monroe's lawyer). These fake documents outlined an alleged settlement agreement between JFK and Marilyn Monroe signed at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on March 3, 1960. The documents, drafted up by Lawrence Cusack, set up a $600,000 trust to be paid by contributions from the individual Kennedy family members to Monroe's mother, Gladys Baker, in order to Monroe to be quiet.

Just from the above, one could see there were certain problems with the story. First, its details could have been culled from reading the pulp fiction in the Monroe field: the idea that JFK had a long, ongoing affair with Monroe; that she had threatened to go public with it; that the family would put up money to save JFK's career etc. Even the touch about the Carlyle Hotel–Kennedy's New York apartment–it comes from Jim Reeves' fiction book. In other words, it is all too stale and contrived, with none of the twists or turns that happen in real life. Hersh had leapt so enthusiastically into the "trash Kennedy" abyss that these questions never seem to have bothered him. The Church Committee couldn't find the connection between illegal anti-Castro activities and JFK... and Richard Nixon couldn't find the connection. But Seymour Hersh found it! Amazing! What total nonsense. Hersh used Lex Cusack's documents to get Little Brown publishers to give him $250,000 anticipated and to sell a documentary on ABC. Linda Hart, one of the handwriting analysts hired by ABC later said that there were indications of "pen drops" in John Kennedy's signature, i.e. someone stopped writing and then started up again, a sure indication of forging. Also, when I talked to Greg Schreiner, president of the Marilyn Monroe fan club in Los Angeles, he told me that the moment he saw Monroe's signature, he knew it was not hers. Interestingly, Schreiner had met with Seymour Hersh this summer. Hersh had told him about the documents and Greg asked to see them but Hersh had refused. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

Former FBI expert Jerry Richards showed one of the most blatant errors in the concoction. The typist had made a misspelling and had gone back to erase it. But the erasure was done with a lift-off ribbon which was not available in 1960 and was not sold until the seventies. This erasure is so clear it even shows up in photos in the Samuels article. Hersh has been a reporter since the early sixties. For at least two decades, he made his living with a typewriter. Yet, in all the hours he spent looking at these papers, this anachronism never jumped out at him? That Hersh could be such an easy mark, that he was so eager to buy into the Summers-Haspiel-Slatzer concoction tells us a lot about what to expect from his book. Hersh has been talking not only to CIA officials, but also to Secret Service people and, especially to Judith Exner. Many in the Secret Service hated Kennedy, realized they were culpable in a security breakdown, and, like Elmer Moore, worked hard to cover up the true circumstances of Kennedy's murder. About Judith Exner's motives, I can only speculate. In a Los Angeles Times review, Edward Epstein cast doubt on these and other assertions, writing, "this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy." Responding to the book, historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Hersh "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered." A month before the publication of The Dark Side of Camelot, newspapers, including USA Today, reported Hersh's announcement that he had removed from the galleys a segment about legal documents allegedly containing JFK's signature. Shortly before Hersh's publicized announcement that he had removed from his book all references to Cusack's documents, federal investigators began probing Lawrence Cusack's sale of the documents at auction. 

After The Dark Side of Camelot was published, Cusack was convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan of forging the documents and sentenced to a long prison term. In 1997 the Kennedy family denied Cusack's claim that his late father had been an attorney who had represented JFK in 1960. If he had asked around back then, Hersh might have learned that Cusack had a penchant for pretending he was a Naval Reserve officer. In August 1994, Cusack had turned up for Parents' Weekend at the U.S. Naval Academy decked out in a fake uniform. If Hersh had contacted the Naval Reserve's personnel command in New Orleans, he would have found no record of Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence Cusack. Asked about that in a recent interview, Cusack admitted that he has never served in the military. There are other anomalies in Cusack's resume. A December 1991 wedding announcement in the New York Times described Cusack as a cum laude recipient of a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University. Actually, he now says, he once audited an architecture course at Harvard.  What's more, the lawyers contradict the younger Cusack's claim that he found the Kennedy papers while going through his father's files after his death at the firm's request. That task, they say, was assigned to Lawrence Cusack's longtime secretary, who had the keys to his two private file cabinets. The secretary, an employee of the firm since 1954, said in an interview that she methodically separated the late senior partner's personal papers from his current client files -- which were promptly parceled out to the other attorneys in the firm. She said she discovered no papers with anything resembling JFK's handwriting on them. To the lawyers at Cusack and Stiles, it looked like somebody had been practicing Kennedy's handwriting. Forensics experts hired by Obenhaus and ABC came to the conclusion the papers were fakes: Because of the typewriter technology employed, the Monroe trust documents -- the most sensational in the file -- couldn't have been typed before the early 1970s, the experts concluded. ABC News ran a report debunking the JFK file, and Hersh rushed to purge his book of all references to the notorious archive. Source: www.washingtonpost.com

The delightful Kennedy aide Dave Powers was not kidding when he said the only Campbell JFK knew was "chunky soup." It is childish to claim that President Kennedy was having a two-and-a-half year relationship with the lunatic woman who had a nervous breakdown because Robert Kennedy's war against the murdererous thugs she slept with [Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli] drove her up the wall. Judith Campbell and John F. Kennedy were not lovers, they were enemies, and if she called White House switch board operators, she didn't get attention. Judith Campbell certainly proved that hell hath no fury like a Mafia Queen's scorn. Reasonable people applauded Robert Kennedy's war against organized crime, Judith Campbell falsely claimed that the President was in bed with the Mafia and the Mafia Queen was supposed to be the fringe benefit. Robert Blakey, who was Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations when it determined that Hoover's FBI was "morally reprehensible, illegal, felonious, and unconstitutional," should know better than to give credence to the Hoover-sponsored, Mafia-supported falsehoods that are designed to assassinate the character of President Kennedy.

The Kennedys had declared war against the Mafia, but according to Campbell, for eighteen months between 1960 and 1961, she regularly carried envelopes back and forth between President Kennedy and Sam Giancana, giving the Mafia direct access to the White House. According to federal wire taps however, as late as December 6, 1961, Giancana was angry over the fact that Frank Sinatra had failed to use the Kennedys to get them off his back and the allegation that Campbell was a direct link to John F. Kennedy was just a Mafia pipe dream. Campbell's fraudulent claim that she was a conduit between Giancana and Kennedy is clearly a reflection of Mafia frustration. The difference between Hoover's FBI and Robert Kennedy's Justice Department was driving Sam Giancana and Judith Campbell crazy. As the Director and Chief Counsel of the Select Committee that studied the Kennedy murders, Robert Blakey diverted attention away from J. Edgar Hoover's obvious complicity in the Kennedy assassination cover-up by asking questions like: "Why did Yuri Nosenko, the KGB defector, lie about his knowledge of Oswald?" and "Did anti-Castro Cuban exiles put Oswald up to killing the president?" Castro and the Mafia did not murder President Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover used Mafia assets to destroy "Communists" and if Justice Department officials like Hoover and Blakey did not ignore their authorized duty, thugs like Carlos Marcello would have not been in a position to murder anybody. What is most egregious about the perpetual plot to assassinate the character of President John F. Kennedy is that former Justice Department officials like Robert Blakey encouraged the distortions of self-admitted perjurors like Judith Campbell, and that is not acceptable. Source: ahabit.com

No comments :