JFK “New Frontier Speech” (November 8, 1960): We are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future. Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. New and more terrible weapons are coming into use. Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal promised security and succor to those in need. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises. It is a set of challenges, a frontier of the mind. A tired nation, said David Lloyd George, is a Tory nation. And the United States today cannot afford to be either tired or Tory. The pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not "every man for himself"--but "all for the common cause."
John F. Kennedy's former Georgetown digs just got a new owner. Last month, the gorgeous colonial residency located at 1400 34th St NW in Washington D.C., sold for $4.2 million. While that's a heavy chunk of change for most, the three-bedroom, four-bathroom home had initially hit the market in February of this year for $4.675 million. The price was dialed back in July, and again in September. On November 30, the home sold. Michael Rankin of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty represented the buyer in the sale. Kennedy lived in the home with his sister Eunice from 1949 to 1951. At the time, he was serving in Congress and his newfound social status would eventually lead him to cross paths with Jacqueline Bouvier. According to the New York Post, Kennedy met Bouvier during his final year living in the Washington, D.C. residence. In May of 1951, he was introduced to Bouvier at a dinner party in the neighborhood. While they didn't officially meet at his home, there's a good chance they spent a lot of time there during their relationship's early days. In 1953, the couple tied the knot. Fast forward a decade and Kennedy is elected as the 35th president of the United States. While the 19th century home has since been brought-up-to-date technology-wise—as well as renovated by renowned architect Richard Foster and builder Tom Glass—it still exudes that Kennedy-era charm. Source: housebeautiful.com
Theoretical physicist Ron Keeva Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the California gubernatorial election, 1994. He received 707,431 votes (34.3 percent) in the primary race against the incumbent Pete Wilson, who won the primary with 1,266,832 votes (61.4 percent). The press referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ. In 1998, Unz sponsored California Proposition 227, which aimed to change the state's bilingual education to an opt-in structured English-language educational system. Unz launched his political campaign with his own initial funds of $1 million. His IQ had been estimated at 214, a statistic that intelligence experts describe as “one in a million.” Educated at Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford universities, Ron Unz mastered not only theoretical physics and computer programming, but also ancient Greek history, being the author of several scholarly papers on the Spartan naval empire and Plutarch. David Horowitz, the conservative activist, told him: ‘You’re an intellectual. Your passion is ideas. You’ll be murdered.’ Unz graduated in 1983 with a double major in theoretical physics and ancient history and headed to England. There on a Churchill Science Fellowship, he studied quantum gravitation under Stephen Hawking.
Ron Unz (author of the essay
American Pravda: the JFK Assassination, 2018): Victor Marchetti had spent 20 years in US Intelligence, most of them at the CIA, and served as the personal aide to Richard Helms, the Deputy Director, before resigning in disgust and writing an important book on the CIA. In 1978, James Angleton and another senior CIA official leaked the story to Marchetti that the CIA had decided to blame its involvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy on E. Howard Hunt, claiming that he had acted as a rogue agent without official authorization. Marchetti wrote a long article about this in The Spotlight, which led Hunt to sue, ultimately resulting in the Lane trial. A scanned copy of the article is available on the CIA website (section library docs): CIA-RDP81M00980R000600230023-6.pdf. Why would the CIA have decided to blame Hunt for the CIA involvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy unless there actually was a JFK assassination conspiracy, and everyone knowledgeable was fully aware of that fact, even if they argued about the exact identity of the conspirators? and John D. Marks, a former State Department intelligence officer, then wrote a nonfiction book, “The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence,” which was ultimately published in 1974. “The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy,” they wrote. “It seeks largely to advance America’s self-appointed role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” In reviewing the manuscript in 1973 for “The C.I.A. and the Cult of Intelligence,” the agency cited 339 passages that it said had to be removed on the grounds that they jeopardized national security. The authors and their publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, challenged the agency in court, accusing it of violating their First Amendment rights. Over several months, the agency whittled down its objections to 168 passages. Knopf then published the book using blank spaces for passages that had been censored and using boldface type to indicate passages that the C.I.A. had initially wanted to censor but later allowed. In the end, a trial judge found that fewer than 30 passages had actually been classified while Mr. Marchetti was a C.I.A. employee.
Leaving aside the precise details of the JFK conspiracy, we have Marchetti, the top CIA officials, and Howard Hunt all pretty much agreeing that there was indeed a JFK conspiracy involving some CIA members. And RFK believed exactly the same thing, as did numerous other top people. It seems to me if all those knowledgeable, well-connected people quietly agree about something so controversial and so endlessly ridiculed by the MSM, well then, it’s probably true. For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs—the commanding heights of “Our American Pravda”—almost immediately endorsed the “lone gunman theory” and with some exceptions generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to minimize those exceptions, casual observers such as myself had received a severely distorted view of the case. If the first two dozen pages of David Talbot's book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President LBJ decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he was led on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. Eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing right behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.
Less than a year after the assassination, JFK mistress Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, was found shot to death in a Washington DC street-killing with no indications of attempted robbery or rape, and the case was never solved. Immediately afterwards, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton was caught breaking into her home in search of her personal diary, which he later claimed to have destroyed. Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career. Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to raise the JFK subject, and see whether he had ever doubted the “lone gunman” orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he’d become absolutely convinced of the reality of a “JFK conspiracy” and over the years had devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed. A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry. For decades, he’d been almost 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse. I began to wonder whether a considerable fraction, perhaps even a majority, of the respectable establishment had long harbored private beliefs about the JFK assassination that were absolutely contrary to the seemingly uniform verdict presented in the media.
In 2013 Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, past president of the Florida Political Science Association, published Conspiracy Theory in America, a fascinating exploration of the history of the concept and the likely origins of the term itself. He noted that during 1966 the CIA had become alarmed at the growing national skepticism of the Warren Commission findings, especially once the public began turning its suspicious eyes toward the intelligence agency itself. Therefore, in January 1967 top CIA officials distributed a memo to all their local stations, directing them to employ their media assets and elite contacts to refute such criticism by various arguments, notably including an emphasis on Robert Kennedy’s supposed endorsement of the “lone gunman” conclusion. This memo, obtained by a later FOIA request, repeatedly used the term “conspiracy” in a highly negative sense, suggesting that “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” be portrayed as irresponsible and irrational. And as I wrote in 2016, "Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day." This possible cause-and-effect relationship is supported by other evidence. Shortly after leaving The Washington Post in 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein published a story entitled “The CIA and the Media” revealing that during the previous quarter century over 400 American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA according to documents on file at the headquarters of that organization. This influence project, known as “Operation Mockingbird,” had allegedly been launched near the end of the 1940s by high-ranking CIA official Frank Wisner, and included editors and publishers situated at the very top of the mainstream media hierarchy. Source: unz.com
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