WEIRDLAND: John Kennedy
Showing posts with label John Kennedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Kennedy. Show all posts

Sunday, May 30, 2021

Happy 104th Anniversary, JFK!

Happy 104th Anniversary, John F Kennedy!

Steven Kossor: New ideas evolve by linking together the known with the possible within a vessel made of memory. There are two kinds of memory: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive memories are what we know. Emotional memories are how we feel about knowing. Healthy emotional memories give us hope and courage about using what we know. Negative emotional memories give us pessimism and fear about using what we know. Emotional memories always trump cognitive memories. Minds poisoned by negative emotional memories will believe things that are not true, correct, adaptive or healthy. When too many people become afflicted with negative emotional memories, hope turns to despair and courage is overcome by fear. In both the foreign "target" country and in the domestic population as well, these outsiders go about implanting negative emotional memories to coerce the population to embrace changes that are not adaptive or healthy, but which meet the needs of the outsiders. Large portions of both the foreign and domestic populations come to embrace the take-over because its necessity is confirmed by the negative emotional memories that have been implanted and nurtured in them. The last straw in the overthrow of foreign governments is the replacement of the former leaders by outsiders. That is how the government of Hawaii was overthrown in the 1800's, and how the overthrow of other foreign governments in the 20th century has been accomplished through the covert actions of US corporate-intelligence operatives, as Stephen Kinzer has documented in Overthrow (Henry Holt & Co., 2006). John Perkins gave us an insider's view of the process in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Plume, 2004). Twentieth century corporate-intelligence leaders have learned from and expanded upon the tactics of their forebears. They utilize modern technology (in all their forms and popular outlets) to implant negative emotional memories that further their ends and conceal their machinations.

In 1963, the inevitable happened. Our own government lost control over its plotters of change in foreign governments. They turned their tactics against our own leaders and against our own people. It's worked for the past fifty years, and the manipulators of unhealthy emotional memories (nobody can ever really know the truth, nobody can really be trusted because everybody is out for themselves, a bad end awaits anyone who causes trouble, the future could be much worse, you have nothing to fear from monitoring if you have nothing to hide, etc) mean to keep it that way. In the last fifty years, as the threads of the Kennedy assassination cover-up started to unravel, renewed efforts were made to create reinforcing negative emotional memories to sustain the old ones. New books and motion pictures emerged, filled with unhealthy emotional memories. They pandered to the same dismal, pathetic, pessimistic views of ourselves and our future – saying things like: “It could be so much worse….” How we responded to this has determined the path of our country, just as it determined the future of every other overthrown government for the past 100 years. That path has been downhill. There is new hope today, because we have some things that didn't exist before -- the internet and digital technology -- but knowledge isn't enough. It takes strong healthy emotional memories to pursue and achieve the healthy changes that we need. We can take the action necessary to fix our situation without compromising our Constitution. We can honor it by restoring power to those we elected and stop allowing secret abuses of it. We will strive to honor and practice, truth and justice. If we have gone astray in the past we will correct our course and move forward confidently, not secretively. Hypocrisy, deceit and greed will not be encouraged by rewarding it.

The Zapruder film has been unequivocally unmasked as an edited record of the events in Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed in 1963. You can find some of the scientific proof of these edits at http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/jfk/intro. Abraham Zapruder was a member of the Dallas Council on World Affairs and he was also a member of the Dallas Petroleum Club, which had many prominent members, including George H. W. Bush and George de Mohrenschildt. And Zapruder had employed de Mohrenschildt's wife, Jeanne LeGon, a fact not mentioned in Zapruder's granddaughter's book. Zapruder's son, Henry, worked for the Justice Department at the time of the assassination. Kennedy's assassination and the doctoring of the evidence was so much more than "a mafia hit." We desperately need leaders who have the courage to take government funding away from the occult corporate-intelligence war making machine. It cannot be allowed to run toward goals that violate our Constitution. The roots of the CIA were created to help the President get untainted information during a World War, and those roots should have been cut down drastically at the end of the war, as President Truman ashamedly admitted after Kennedy was assassinated. John Taylor Gatto’s books, especially An Underground History of Education in America (Oxford Village Press, 2006) document the devastation wrought by the corporate-intelligence interests that have insinuated themselves into the school business and effectively hijacked the future of the American people. We rushed to judgment in 1964 under the pretense of avoiding a global nuclear holocaust, preventing World War III, and other such imagined catastrophes and concluded that a "lone nut" killed the President of the United States. Still, many have talked. Their stories were unpublished and unreported, or vigorously discredited, by the mainstream media “assets” of the corporate-intelligence cult. But healthy emotional memories persist and continue to fuel the urge that almost all of have: to tell the truth. Congress reacted to manufactured fear in 1964 in founding the Warren Commission to suppress independent investigations of the Kennedy assassination. It happened again in 1990 to justify going to war in Iraq. In 2008 when fabulously wealthy and comparably amoral thieves had failed to run their businesses responsibly for decades, taxpayers were hit with a bum's rush and gave away $700 Billion dollars to save the US economy. Michael Crichton, in State of Fear (Harper Collins, 2004) argued for removing politics from science and used global warming and real-life historical examples in the appendices to make this argument. In a 2003 speech at the California Institute of Technology he expressed his concern about what he considered the "emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy." 

President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address warned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Later in that same speech, Eisenhower said: "Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow." Finally, former President Truman warned us on December 22, 1963 in the Washington Post about the monster that the CIA had become through its covert operations capability that he had absolutely never intended it to have. He wrote: "I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President. But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere." Source: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com

Monday, May 10, 2021

JFK's love letters, JFK Jr & Carolyn Bessette

Love letters that John F. Kennedy wrote to a Swedish paramour a few years after he married Jacqueline Bouvier are going up for auction. “You are wonderful and I miss you,” Kennedy scribbled at the end of a February 1956 letter to aristocrat Gunilla von Post, whom he’d met on the French Riviera a few weeks before he wed Bouvier in 1953. Kennedy was a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts at the time, and the handwritten letters were written on Senate letterhead. He signed one simply: “Jack.” Von Post, who died in 2011 in Palm Beach, Florida, wrote a 1997 memoir, “Love, Jack,” about her relationship with Kennedy. A 1955 letter began: “Dear Gunilla, I must say you looked well and happy in the photograph you sent me at the Regatta.” Kennedy then sketched out his plans to head to Europe after Congress recessed early in August of that year, writing: “I shall be in Sweden on the 12th. Where do I go. Send me your address at Bastad where you shall be.” In the 1956 letter, Kennedy expressed regret that von Post wouldn't be traveling to the U.S. as he'd hoped. "I must say I was sad to learn that, after all, you are not coming to the U.S.," he wrote. "If you don't marry come over as I should like to see you. I had a wonderful time last summer with you. It is a bright memory of my life," Kennedy wrote. "I am anxious to see you. Is it not strange after all these months? Perhaps at first it shall be a little difficult as we shall be strangers - but not strangers - and I am sure it will all work and I shall think that though it is a long way to Gunilla - it is worth it." "This is the only Kennedy letter that we have offered that displays open affection to another woman while he was married," the auction house said. 

In her memoir, von Post recounted Kennedy's efforts to end his marriage to Bouvier and bring her to the U.S. In the end, the future president's hopes of doing that were thwarted by his authoritarian father, Joseph P. Kennedy; JFK's own political ambitions; and the future first lady's 1955 miscarriage and 1956 pregnancy. Von Post and Kennedy saw each other only one other time: a chance encounter at a gala at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in 1958, when the Swede was pregnant with her first child. Source: edition.cnn.com

JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette had been married for less than three years when they were killed in a plane crash on July 16, 1999, but their romance remains the stuff of legend. Richard Bradley, who served as executive editor at George magazine, says in Taraborrelli's The Kennedy Heirs: "When you were with them," Bradley continued, "you felt John had really put forth a new power couple in the family, and there had been a lot of them, like Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice [Shriver]. John had always had a thing about the Kennedy power couples of the past, and this was how he wanted to view himself and Carolyn. So, I guess one could say that Carolyn was becoming the woman behind the man, and John was happy and proud about it. I think his mom would have been as well." And importantly for Carolyn, who did her best to ignore the women of all ages who shamelessly threw themselves at her fiancé, John wasn't too old-fashioned. Unlike so many of the men in his family, including his late father, President John F. Kennedy, he aspired to take their relationship, and their eventual marital vows, seriously. "I see what goes on in this family, and it scares me," Carolyn had admitted to her friend Stewart Price, according to The Kennedy Heirs. Price reminded her that John was different, to which she replied, "It's a good thing, too. I know myself and I'm definitely not that pathetic Kennedy wife who'll stay home with the kids while her husband is out screwing around. No. I'm that pissed-off Kennedy wife who'll be in prison because she took matters into her own hands." Friends of the couple encouraged Carolyn not to engage with the press—don't worry if they call you names, you can't win either way, they advised her—and equally encouraged John to be more sensitive to Carolyn's concerns. After all, she didn't grow up with that life. But the story didn't change: not their clashing temperaments, not their communication issues and certainly not the press's consistently rabid interest in their lives, the paparazzi obviously hoping for a follow-up to their February 1996 performance in the park. "She told me she felt manipulated and compromised, as if she had no authority over her own life," Carolyn's friend told Taraborrelli. 

"She said she was putting John on probation. 'I'm going to give it three more months and see how I feel,' she said." Carolyn admitted she might be over-dramatizing the situation, but she said she needed "a cooling-off period and that in a few months she'd have more clarity. They'd been having a lot of marital problems lately, she said, and she was worn down by then." The couple had started marriage counseling that March. "It's all falling apart," John lamented to another friend from his perch at the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue. And he didn't just mean his marriage. George was in serious financial trouble, the publishing business being notoriously difficult even then, before the death knell of print had sounded, and John went to meet potential investors in Toronto in early July. He flew himself up there, with a copilot. But even if he lost his magazine, he was determined to not lose Carolyn, and he was looking forward to putting that plan into action somehow during Rory's wedding weekend. Source: eonline.com

An editor familiar with the 2003 Ed Klein-sponsored Carolyn smear book opined: "Clearly he writes from a biased perspective. The smear campaign against Carolyn's reputation continued on with the publishing of some extracts from The Kennedy Curse to Vanity Fair, a magazine ambivalent towards the Kennedy family. Indeed it appears that this smear campaign may have started earlier than the crash - when, according to sources close to the couple, JFK Jr's behavior flew out of control. Apparently, Carolyn had caught JFK Jr cheating on her and he even boasted about the 'desire' he felt for other women. A friend told The Mail on Sunday: 'John was an egomaniac, a sybarite and a womanizer. He wanted to have children to perpetuate his genes. All Kennedys marry for that reason. This poor girl was there to bear his son and perform as First Lady. If she didn't care for life in the fishbowl, tough. John thrived on public attention. Even before the wedding, the Kennedys began to work on Carolyn, telling her how she should dress, how she should behave. Her self-confidence was never great.' 

'She came from a broken home in the suburbs. She was beautiful but she felt she was never beautiful enough. When John began to neglect her, she went into a downward spiral. If Carolyn took drugs it was as a sort of escape. But they made her more depressed until she didn't even want to leave the house. Early in their marriage, she became convinced John was cheating on her. She found it impossible to trust him, even when his motives were innocent.' Another friend of Carolyn thought John could exhibit chauvinist-like behaviour at times, so the couple started to have bad arguments. However, journalists began to receive calls from sources in the Kennedy inner circle who wanted to give them 'the real scoop'. 'I was told Carolyn was a drama queen, always complaining and frigid. She didn't want to get pregnant, and didn't want to do anything except hang out with her "fag friends",' one columnist reveals. 'There also was a tip that she was doing so much coke she had white circles under her nose.' The sensational 'white circles' slur featured prominently in Klein's book and grabbed headlines around the world. But many were unconvinced by these false claims. 'It seemed unlikely she could be as crazy as they claimed,' one journalist told me. 'It would be hard for anyone to be more screwed up than a male Kennedy. I also knew, of course, about how dangerous this family can be when they perceive anyone to be a threat to their image. Carolyn clearly was that threat. John was hoping to run for Senate and the last thing he needed was to be tarred as the latest Kennedy adulterer. The air of breeding which captivated John when he first met Carolyn was deceptive. He told friends he saw her as the embodiment of his elegant mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.'

'But Carolyn's heritage was more modest. She was the youngest child of William J. Bessette, who was the Chief Civil Engineer for Whiting Turner Contracting Company. William J. Bessette helped to build international airports all over the globe and was brought in to fix the Statue of Liberty renovation projects - which were behind schedule. Carolyn's mother was Ann Messina, an administrator in the New York City public school system. Carolyn had two older sisters, twins Lauren and Lisa. The Bessette family shared ancestral lineage with André Bessette, more commonly known as Brother Andre of Montreal. Carolyn's parents were divorced and Ann later married the chief of orthopaedic surgery at a large hospital and settled in Connecticut. The family were comfortably off, but Carolyn attended a redbrick university and considered a teaching career. But one day, while temping at a Calvin Klein shop, she was  discovered by one of Calvin's associates.' A friend says: 'She got this whole new sophisticated look and became quite a party girl. I think she was very confused. There was a lot of ill-will between her parents and the New York scene was an escape, but not a very well thought-out one. She really didn't like living in the city but John refused to leave. He believed it was the perfect base for his career.' 'Carolyn used to do drugs recreationally before she met John,' recalls a friend. 'Everyone did in New York, John included. But when John started straying, she just couldn't take it. There were times he would come home after fooling around and find her hollow-eyed, she was so stoned. He'd scream that she was a cokehead. But it was his behavior that did it. She was so sad. He was going on at her about having a baby. He'd even chosen a name, Flynn - he was certain it was going to be a son. Carolyn couldn't cope. She was deeply depressed. She'd lost interest in sex. She'd seen a psychiatrist who gave her antidepressants but they couldn't solve the real problem: John.' 

Furious at being banned from his wife's bed, John told colleagues he was going to get a divorce. 'No Kennedy will stand for that kind of treatment,' one of them says. But relatives tried to convince him to save the marriage. 'Divorce is never the best thing for a politician,' he was allegedly told by the Kennedy clan. Friends say the Bessette family were inconsolable about the traducing of their daughter's memory and false allegations, but they insist on maintaining a dignified silence. “John’s life was huge—with dozens of friendships and involvements—but Carolyn couldn’t handle that,” one of her closest friends told. “She didn’t want to go out. She would ditch John’s friends, not show up for dinner, refuse to go to people’s houses or events. She burned a lot of bridges.” Sources: Vanityfair.com and other anonymous sources

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

Saturday, July 25, 2020

The Kennedys' Bill of The Century, JFK Jr., Oliver Stone and Brecht's influence on NBK

John F. Kennedy: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” Howie Carr’s column, which was printed on July 4th in The Boston Herald, is a nutty litany of the conservative and politically motivated vendetta that is trotted out every time the reactionaries think: “Hey, things have gotten so bad that the public might be reminded of how much progress was made during the Kennedy presidency.” No president before Kennedy ever confronted the civil rights issue as he did. No one was even close. It was the preceding century of near inertia that created the immense problem that President Kennedy faced in 1961. But to his credit, Kennedy pressed the issue from the outset. Finally, the inspiration and support he gave the civil rights movement, provided the opportunity to pass what Clay Risen has called the “bill of the century”. What JFK achieved in three years is quite remarkable, especially when compared to his White House predecessors (Dwight Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt) in thirty years prior. 

In the wake of the sensation caused by the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, scores of books were either released or republished in order to capitalize on that publicity wave. Many of these were utterly worthless, but that did not matter to the MSM. Since Chuck Giancana had a famous last name, he got exposure. Chuck was the half-brother of “Momo” Giancana, the Chicago don. Sam Giancana was his half-nephew and they co-authored the book. Therefore, these two collaborators (Sam and Chuck Giancana) were taken at their word, without any due diligence done by the media or any consultation with experts in the field who could give them such analysis. I had little regard for it when I first read it; I have less for it now. In fact, today, not only do I think it is mythological, I think it is scatological. It has the historical value of a Harold Robbins novel. Double Cross also stated that the Outfit owned the contract of Marilyn Monroe. As the esteemed Don McGovern notes in his book on the subject, this is more bunk. McGovern goes on to demonstrate how Double Cross libels Joe Schenck and Marilyn Monroe about both their personal reputations and professional careers. If that is not goofy enough, the book claims that Giancana had Monroe killed on orders of the CIA and they killed her with a rectal suppository. As McGovern notes, Momo Giancana must have had some great chemist working for him, because the type of suppository described in the book was not invented at the time of Marilyn’s death in 1962. (McGovern, pp. 511-514)

I won’t even go into the issues of why the CIA would want Monroe killed or why, of all people, they would contract that assignment out to Giancana. I will say, though, that when Double Cross came out in 1992, there were multi-segment specials about it on the programs ET and Hard Copy. They accepted the book at virtually face value. Thus is the culture we inhabit. Influenced by the work of his sister Eunice Shriver, one of the first things Robert Kennedy did as attorney general was to take a dual interest in the rights of the poor to have attorneys and also the problems and causes of juvenile delinquency. (Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America, p. 68) Other times, David Hackett would show RFK the shabby conditions of schools or recreation areas. The attorney general was moved by these and so he invited celebrities—Cary Grant, Edward R. Murrow—to come into those blighted neighborhoods to give talks to the kids who lived there. (Schmitt, pp. 69-70) The attorney general would also attain appropriations to repair some of these facilities. America was sitting on a ticking time-bomb. While everyone was concentrating on the South, Hackett and Bobby Kennedy were examining sociological predicaments elsewhere that could not be solved by an accommodations bill or a voting rights act. In these places, the problems were not simple and the remedy was not as direct. In fact, RFK predicted that riots would erupt soon if nothing was done. (Schmitt, p. 86) He told a Senate committee in February of 1963 that America was “racing the clock against disaster… We must give the members of this new lost generation some real hope in order to prevent a shattering explosion of social problems in the years to come.” 

Needless to say, no other administration had ever gone this far in this specific field. Richard Russell was so worried that he told his colleague Senator Harry Byrd that what he feared if Kennedy got elected was that he would go beyond even the Democratic platform. (Brauer, p. 53) The insight may have originated from Russell’s personal exposure to Kennedy while they were in the Senate. And indeed, that is what the president was doing at the time of his death, before his civil rights bill passed. As the president told Heller at their last meeting on the topic, “Yes, Walter, I am definitely going to have something in the line of an attack on poverty.” (Schmitt, p. 93) To show how interested he was, at his final meeting with his cabinet, President Kennedy mentioned the word “poverty” six times. After his death, Jackie Kennedy took the notes of that meeting to Bobby Kennedy. The attorney general had them framed and put up on his wall. (Schmitt, pp. 92, 96) As Hackett told RFK, the situation America faced in 1962 it was much more complicated than the FDR's New-Deal era. Kennedy was going to face the poverty problem in 1964 in order to transform it into a national issue. He did not plan on starting his program until after the 1964 election. (Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, p. 71) What happened after his death shows how important one man can be in determining the currents of history. Walter Heller met with Johnson the day after Kennedy’s murder. The economist told the new president about the ideas he and JFK had reviewed for relieving poverty. When Heller got back to him with the demonstration projects that were running under Hackett, Johnson almost eliminated the entire program. The new president understood that the civil rights act making its slow way through Congress was really Kennedy’s.

As I have noted, Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century proves that point. But Kennedy’s poverty program had not been formally announced or written up. Therefore, Johnson could present it as his own. A bit over four months later, Johnson would announce the Great Society. Most analysts have differentiated the Great Society from the War on Poverty. The main agency for the latter was called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). In five years, from 1965-70, OEO was granted 1.5% of the budget for all of its programs. Needless to say, all this hubbub necessitated that the cautious Hackett be retired to the sidelines. Which he was. While Johnson was putting together his package, David Hackett—the man who ran the program for three years, who knew more about it than anyone—was now working on Bobby Kennedy’s senatorial campaign in New York. RFK tried to intervene to no avail. Hackett wanted what he called his “community action experiments” to resemble something like a socialist democratic laboratory. It didn’t end up that way. With unwise alacrity, Johnson sent his program to Congress in March of 1964. As Harris Wofford notes in his book, the choice Johnson made to replace Hackett with as supervisor of his War on Poverty surprised many people. But Johnson couldn’t wholly kill it, since Robert Kennedy was still attorney general. Instead, he added other elements to it: a job training program, a summer jobs program, a work-study program, assistance to small farms and small business, and the aforementioned VISTA program. This brought in other parts of the administration, like the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Office of Education.

Bobby Kennedy had targeted help for pre-school children that would bypass the regular school system. Later, RFK continued in this vein by saying: "The institutions which affect the poor—education, welfare, recreation, business, labor—are huge, complex structures, operating outside their control. They plan programs for the poor, not with them." (Matusow, p. 126) What Kennedy and Hackett were saying was rather simple: How can we trust the same people who allowed these inequities in the first place with the millions meant to cure them? (Schulman, p. 94) Author Schulman then listed a few examples that proved the Hackett/Kennedy warning. By 1967, Johnson had folded his cards on community action. He allowed them to be taken over by the local entities Hackett & Kennedy feared. In the end, LBJ had lost all faith in it and said it was being run by “kooks and sociologists”. (Matusow, p. 270) The beginning of Johnson losing faith started in Watts in the late summer of 1965. To his credit, I have never read anything that states that Bobby Kennedy had his “I told you so” moment at this time, even though, as we have seen, he did predict it. RFK visited Watts in November of 1965. When he returned, he told a couple of his staffers, Ed Edelman and Adam Walinsky, to continue with Hackett’s research, but to take it a step further. He wanted ideas on how to address the entire phenomenon of the urban ghetto and how to structurally transform it. They did so, and in January of 1966, the senator gave three speeches on the subject of race and poverty. (John Bohrer,The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, pp. 255-61) Those speeches marked the birth of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration project.

It was RFK’s answer to Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal. As Michael Harrington said of RFK, “As I look back on the sixties, he was the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.” (Wofford, p. 420) Journalist Pete Hammill wrote RFK before the presidential race of 1968: "I wanted to remind you that in Watts, I didn’t see pictures of Malcolm X or Ron Karenga on the walls. I saw pictures of JFK." One is left to imagine what America would be like today if President Kennedy had lived, and Bobby Kennedy and Dave Hackett had run the War on Poverty. Without Vietnam, and those men in charge, it is even possible that America would not have burned. 

Oliver Stone - Tom Fordy and The Telegraph: With a new documentary and a new autobiography  Chasing the Light coming out, Oliver Stone is once again being met, in advance, by trolls intent on burying the truth of JFK’s foreign policy and his assassination. Fordy is a Warren Commission shill who might as well be writing in 1967. Yet in some cases, he is even worse than that. As everyone knows, the 1991 film JFK was based largely on Jim Garrison’s 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins. That book was essentially Garrison’s memoir of his investigation into the murder of President Kennedy which he conducted through his position as DA of New Orleans Parish. Stone’s film was so cinematically powerful and its intellectual effect so shocking that it provoked the creation of a new agency of government: The Assassination Records Review Board. That board was in session from 1994–98 and declassified 2 million pages of previously redacted papers; 60,000 documents in all. It then declassified, on a timed-release schedule, thousands more. Fordy's  foot in mouth moment is when he says that Kennedy signed off on an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. Again, this shows that neither Fordy nor Drinkwater ever read the declassified documents of the ARRB, because, in 1995, the Board issued an unredacted version of the CIA’s Inspector General Report on the plots to kill Fidel Castro. On several pages of that report, one will see the issue of presidential authorization of the Agency plots addressed. In every instance, the reply comes back in the negative. In other words, the CIA had no such presidential authorization from Kennedy or any other president, i. e. Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon B. Johnson. Source: kennedysandking.com

In the years since John F. Kennedy Jr's passing, the fascination doesn’t seem to be on the level of Marilyn Monroe/James Dean-like cult, and there are not nearly as many death theories and myths that haunt his father’s legacy. With the exception of Steven Gillon's The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr: America's Reluctant Prince, the rest of published memoirs about him or his wife Carolyn Bessette were sketchy or trashy. However, there is a brief yet good memoir that explains the political icon as a flesh-and-blood man, written by someone who really knew well, his best friend, The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert T. Littell first met John Kennedy Jr. while they were both freshmen at Brown University in 1979. Their instant bond grew into a life-long friendship, until Kennedy died at the age of 38. “I felt obligated to stand up for him, frankly,” Littell says. “He bent over backwards just to be a great guy.” JFK talking about his children: "I hope my children live as good people, that they understand that though they have what many don’t, that does not make them better—but that they can do better, they can help make a difference in this land of freedom in which freedom has not been given to all. My hope is that they’re gracious and sensible in their actions. And if politics is their passion, well, I can’t very well argue with that now can I?”

Robert Littell, who was born in Milwaukee and brought up in Connecticut, had a rough go of it himself. Though he was upper-middle-class and attended prep school, his father, a writer, had committed suicide at 40. His mother had remarried but more for worse than for better. He thinks of his family as “dysfunctional,” and describes himself as a “street-smart Republican.” Although the friendship would seem unlikely, he says this was a good basis for his relationship with Kennedy. “We were both brought up by women,” he says, “and we both lacked a strong father figure. We sort of linked arms from that. We had the exact same experience there. There was a shared trauma between us for not having a dad. I watched his mind develop and mature. He learned how to master his negotiating skills. He already had the focus and the intellect inside of him and he learned how to bring it out and master it over the years.” Littell witnessed this first-hand, during their years together at Brown, and then during their student trips to Europe on the cheap (because of John’s love of being just an average guy). They also shared an apartment together after college, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

“John was a bad drinker,” Littell recalls. “He was a two or three-beers guy. He couldn’t have six beers. He was the kind of guy who just wanted to be in control all the time. He really valued his sense of control. He needed to, because he was always ‘on stage.’ He was a modern Renaissance man.” It seemed inevitable that John would go into some sort of public service, like most of his family. However he wanted to do it on his terms. “He was offered to run for office in New Jersey and Rhode Island,” Littell says, “but he wanted to do it in New York. Everyone had expectations but he didn't want to lead as a young man. He wanted to have his youth first. He wanted to give back. He wanted to serve the people–not for recognition. He didn’t need it. He already had it.” Littell married soon after college, and had two children and settled into a life of domestic bliss in Manhattan. “John respected and admired my getting married and having kids,” he says. 

“John was naturally monogamous. When Christina Haag broke up with her boyfriend, he said to me, ‘My future wife is free!’ He wanted to have a nice, stable life. He admired his sister Caroline’s life, and wanted to have that and as soon as possible. After his mother Jackie died, it was a heavy burden, because he was now an orphan. He wanted to have a family of his own.” Of course, his future wife turned out not to be Christina Haag or Daryl Hannah but Carolyn Bessette, who, according to Littell, was “the most empathetic, sensitive person that I’ve ever met. She was my children’s favorite friend. And she wanted to be sensitive. She didn’t want to develop a thick skin. I think her sensitivity sometimes hurt her, but they were soul mates. They loved each other tremendously. When they were together, sparks flew.” John Perry Barlow, another good friend of John Jr. recalled of the Cumberland ceremony: "I remember many odd moments at John's wedding. I was having a languid conversation with Christiane Amanpour and Jackie's old boyfriend Maurice Tempelsman. I had many vivid experiences of that wedding, including John sternly telling me that now she was married, I could no longer leer at his wife Carolyn."

“John made me a much better person by his loyalty, his sense of honor, how polite and graceful he was to everybody,” Littell says. “He related to the underdog. He couldn’t stand the idea of elitism. He was actually a very simple man. He was a camper sort of guy. He liked to ground himself. He was not cynical. He was a really kind guy. He was stubborn and told me again and again: ‘I will never be a cynic.’ He was an innovator for starting George magazine and he had a lot of courage. His magazine began to hemorrhage money and was expected to lose $10 million in 1999. To John’s frustration, George never earned the respect of the journalistic community, which considered it an amateur venture. The fact that he made that decision that he was not going to be cynical, that he was going to rinse himself of that, was really inspirational.” Source: www.popentertainment.com

Bertolt Brecht: Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the stage. He wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognise social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable. One of Brecht's most important principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization effect", "estrangement effect", or "alienation effect"). "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg," Raymond Williams argued. Brecht used his poetry to criticize European culture, including Nazis, and the German bourgeoisie. Brecht's collaborations with Kurt Weill have influence in rock music. The "Alabama Song", originally published as a poem in Brecht's Hauspostille (1927) and set to music by Weill in Mahagonny, was recorded by The Doors, and various other bands and performers since the 1960s.

There's that classic quote from Quentin Tarantino about how "Violence is one of the most fun things to watch" and never before have I seen a movie more thoroughly challenge, and ultimately tear itself to pieces over that statement than Oliver Stone's film, 'Natural Born Killers' (1994). Based on an original screenplay by none-other than Quentin Tarantino, who eventually relented into conceding Stone's unique vision, 'Natural Born Killers' is still one of the most controversial Hollywood movies ever made. Owing to its very graphic violence and frenzied, near subliminal, visual and editing style it is genuinely one of the most unnerving and unconventional films of the 1990's. 

We cut back to the day of the interview, where Mickey gives Wayne plenty of well-composed quotable remarks to fill his program - explaining his motives plainly as being a ‘natural born killer’, thus giving the movie a title - and then a riot goes down in the laundry room which forces the deputies to concentrate their efforts on pacifying the other inmates; giving Mickey an opportunity to take the camera crew hostage and force the release of Mallory from her holding cell - the two having been separated for a year and romantically longing for each other since. The idea Stone wants to present is clear - that media enterprises like those ‘American Maniacs’ is inspired by and represent are deeply immoral and often help aid or indeed validate the actions of those they’re so eager to depict. Meanwhile, Wayne is eager to get this one final interview, primarily because he stands to gain massive ratings and therefore financial compensation for his work. It's the fact that Wayne Gail and the network he represents stands to gain a lot of money by continually making content about people like Mickey and Mallory. There’s a *capitalist* incentive there, rather than one of mere perverse intellectual curiosity. 

There’s a real meaningful interesting point being made here about how the media is a participant in the events it depicts, and it demonstrates this literally by having Wayne Gail and his camera be part of the climax and its action. Wayne is directly responsible for Mickey and Mallory’s escape, by naively playing into their hands, by assuming control because he’s a big media boy with a TV network backing him, and without fully grasping exactly who he’s dealing with. Because of course, the big punchline here is that Mickey and Mallory Knox are both actively, knowingly exploiting their own infamy as a means to escape prison - and just Wayne is the naive conduit for that. In a way, the script aims to comment on exactly that kind of media irresponsibility, and it does it with surprising deftness.

Oliver Stone decided he wanted almost every single shot in the film to use a different lens, a different stock, and a different angle so therefore no single shot can be seen as objective. Not even standard shot reverse has a 1:1 equivalency. We transition to scenes with TV static and brief shots of Coca-Cola commercials as if we’re thumbing through a cable box, occasionally interrupted by subliminal flashes. The scenes themselves are littered with fake rear-projection backgrounds, overlays, and coloured lighting, designed to deliberately highlight the artificiality and unreality of the production, to a positively Brechtian degree. Not a single frame in Oliver Stone’s production goes by without reminding you that you’re taking part in viewing a piece of media and not real people inhabiting a real world. What they’ve done here is an attempt to turn it into a kind of metafilm - what Stone is attempting here is a kind of Bretchian ‘Epic Theatre’, i.e. a production that emphasises the unreality of the production itself.

With the goal being to make the audience confront what their reality actually is - because according to Brecht, once you know how all of this works, or is made to work, you can speculate on what it could be. So this gharishness is essentially a type of ‘deliberate estrangement.’ NBK is a quintessential Generation X movie. The critical response was negative in general, seeing his satire as 'too blunt.' However, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and wrote, "Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Oliver Stone's vision in Natural Born Killers is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering." Sticking with the Brechtian influence on Stone's filming tecniques in NBK, you could even argue that this film reframes the story as "Two B-movie action heroes are constructed for public consumption, they become aware they are a part of a media construct, and manipulate their media construct in order to destroy it, and thus attain freedom". -"The Social Construction of Nature and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers" (2012) by Jeremy Withers

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death by Donald McGovern

Among the thousand or more books about Marilyn Monroe, there are certain strands – from coffee-table monographs to cultural criticism. One theme is so persistent, however, that it has become a sub-genre in its own right. Armed with dubious confessions and conspiracy theories, their authors argue that Marilyn’s untimely death was the result of foul play in high places, and these allegations have been ruminated by some readers, as well as journalists and documentarians. But a handful of writers have directly challenged these assumptions. In 2005, David Marshall collected the findings of hardcore fans from The DD Group: An Online Investigation Into the Death of Marilyn Monroe. Ánd more recently, Monroe's biographer Gary Vitacco-Robles, and forensic pathologist Dr Cyril Wecht. First-time author Donald McGovern follows in their footsteps with Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death (2019), a rigorous excavation of the myths and legends, meticulously structured and packed with intricate detail over 566 pages. During the final months of her life, Marilyn was embroiled in a bitter legal battle with her studio; she was having daily sessions with Dr Greenson, and relying on sleeping pills from her physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg. Monroe may have met John and Robert Kennedy on just four occasions; their daily itineraries are in the public domain, and her routine is also well-documented. Only one sexual encounter with the president can be reasonably ascertained. Her own sporadic journal entries throughout her life (collected in the 2010 book Fragments) contain no references to either Kennedy. McGovern looks finally to her autopsy report, compiled by renowned pathologist Dr. Thomas Noguchi, for the true cause of her death. As a long-time drug user, Marilyn had a high tolerance which enabled her to ingest multiple pills in succession. Conspiracists have pointed to a cover-up, but as Noguchi pointed out, the toxicologist’s analysis of her liver and blood samples made further tests unnecessary. With dry wit and exhaustive scrutiny, McGovern exposes the insupportable and absurd aspects of what has nonetheless become an urban myth. McGovern’s book will not, of course, be the last word on the subject; but it offers a timely redress to decades of shallow sensationalism. And in an era when ‘fake news’ is poisoning the fabric of public life, McGovern’s systematic unravelling of the calculated distortions that have so clouded Marilyn Monroe’s legacy provides us with a very modern cautionary tale. Source: www.immortalmarilyn.com

At this point, the distortions of Marilyn Monroe's story and its connection with the Kennedys have become a grotesque black comedy. David Heymann and Donald Wolfe are probably two of the worst. But there is a whole bullpen full of them and they have created this cottage industry that the MSM just buys into. It's amazing that they still try to say RFK was in Brentwood the day Marilyn died. Because back in 2011, Susan Bernard, Bruno Bernard’s daughter, published Marilyn: Intimate Exposures which featured her father’s photographic work with the blonde actress. In that book there is a two page spread of pictures of the Kennedy family at John Bates's ranch in Gilroy on that day. There are about 11 pictures of RFK from morning to dinner time going horseback riding, swimming at the pool, and playing touch football. John Bates' son sent the photos to her on a DVD. And he pointed himself out in the pictures. That is what is called forensic evidence. Yet according to Heymann, Wolfe etc, while Bobby was playing football in Gilroy, he was also in Brentwood?  The pictures at the Gilroy Ranch of RFK.  When I saw those photos, it was like getting slapped in the face. These have clearly been suppressed in order for the MSM to prolong a piece of cultural dementia. McGovern's research in his book Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death is amazing. Two general takeaways: The MSM have been successful in making us think the worst of JFK, RFK and Marilyn Monroe. Second, this Monroe case, which is not a conspiracy, gets media time, while the JFK and RFK cases, which were conspiracies, get less and less time. It's sad the business opportunists in the Monroe field have borrowed from the JFK case, and inserted pieces of heisted data to aggrandize their own enterprise. Pretty disgusting if you ask me. The McGovern book is a real breath of sanity and fresh air in a field that has been dominated by con artists and clowns for too long. Monroe's performance in New York took place in May of 1962 at the Madison Square Garden. It was a fundraiser convention for the Democratic Party. Fifteen thousand people were in attendance. Monroe was one of about 14 stars who performed. When she left the stage, Monroe was escorted by her former father in law, then she went to the Arthur Krim's after party and after she met some fans back at her hotel. And that was it.

In addition to the Madison Square Garden birthday fuss, it was also said that Marilyn had a roll in the hay with JFK in LA during the 1960 convention. Little problem there. Marilyn was not in LA at that time. She was filming a picture on the east coast. What McGovern did is he compared the calendars of JFK and RFK, and then contrasted that with two day by day books that were recently published about Monroe. When comparing it with an established record, anecdotal evidence has to be exceptional in quality and should have corroboration in a tangible way, or it should be discarded. The problem with the witnesses that these so-called writers use is they are a collection that would be laughed out of any legal proceeding. They would never make it to trial since they would be blown up at the deposition stage. Most of them would make Howard Brennan look OK. Peter Lawford was of sound mind when he said about Marilyn's phone call, 'I should have gone over to her place since she was not sounding good'. That means alone since as I prove, RFK was not in Brentwood, he was in Gilroy. It turns out that Marilyn did have a sort of diary, a planner agenda in loose leaf paper. It was recovered in one of her storage boxes after a dispute was resolved over her estate. It was nothing like Slatzer or Heyman said it was. The bulk of her estate was given over to the Strasberg family, since Lee Strasberg had been Monroe's acting coach. Those notebooks were compiled in a book called Fragments in 2010. There is no mention of Giancana, Roselli, Hoover, or Tony Accardo. Frank Sinatra is not in there and neither is Fidel Castro. Nothing is written about any romance with the Kennedy brothers either. (McGovern, pp. 264-271). But to show the reader just how off the cliff our culture is on this matter, Grandison’s book Memoirs of a Deputy Coroner was published in 2012. Two years after Fragments. We have now entered the world of high camp. What McGovern does to the guy who really started all this rubbish, the late Robert Slatzer, should be taught in journalism classes. He actually found an archive of primary materials that exposes Slatzer completely as a fraud. And the worst part of it is that the book publishing company was a part of the fraud. McGovern exposes the Giancana book  as a farce in every major tenet. From what I read that was a book editor's scheme, the Giancana's first draft was not spicy enough. So they jazzed it up with all this phony stuff about Judith Exner, Joe Kennedy's bootlegging--absolute bunk-,  and how the mob helprf win Chicago, when in fact the actual mob controlled  districts had a low level turnout.

The Mob in Hollywood (2012) by John William Tuohy presented Marilyn as a drug addled starlet helped by the Mafia. As McGovern explains, (p. 397) this is not the case at all. The way this gets screwy is through the William Morris-Bioff affair which is greatly misrepresented by the fiction writers. But it was really Johnny Hyde of William Morris Agency who got Marilyn Monroe into The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. Those were two highly acclaimed films. Off of those he got her a long term contract with Fox studios. Marilyn Monroe's publicist, Rupert Allan, whom I found to be an honest and sophisticated man (Rupert was also Princess Grace's publicist), told me he thought Marilyn died of an accidental overdose because she was taking pills adding to the mix small bottles of Champagne she routinely had around her bedroom. As per Eunice Murray, this gaggle of Monroe conspiracists ignores what Murray originally said and they got her to change her story. The pictures of RFK do not lie. The newspaper report does not lie. The reports by the FBI before Marilyn was reported dead do not lie. And eleven people who had no interest in politics would not lie. Marilyn did not have any connection to Roselli or Giancana. Her career was never mob influenced. Marilyn did not sign her first film contract until late August of 1946 with Fox. She was represented by Harry Lipton of the NCAC agency. Johnny Hyde of William Morris bought her contract from Lipton. And then she was signed by Columbia. Johnny Hyde paid for Monroe to have made a rhinoplasty, and also arranged a bit part in the Marx Brothers film Love Happy (1950).

In Gary VItacco Robles' volume 2 bio, Icon, considered by many the best Monroe biography out there, or at least one of the top three, he has her attending with Joe DiMaggio, at the invitation of Dean Martin. Marilyn wanted to go as a way of thanking Martin for supporting her during the studio crisis on Something's Got to Give. Martin also wanted her to remarry DiMaggio. But further, Martin and Monroe were also discussing a future film project they might work on. There was no Red Diary of Secrets, and there was no press conference scheduled for Monday the 6th. These are myths piled onto a small hillock of them designed to create a paradigm, instead they have created toxic sludge. But then what about assistant DA John Miner and his “tapes”? Miner's story was heavily promoted by the LA Times. In 1962, Miner was part of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s medical-legal division. He observed Monroe’s autopsy and allegedly interviewed Dr. Greenson, who had made two streams of consciousness type tapes in the weeks before her death. Greenson made Miner promise never to reveal their contents. Miner so complied and the lawyer said he made extensive notes on them (McGovern, pp. 458-59). There were two things that were odd about his story. First, in the summer of 1962, Greenson was talking to Monroe every day, sometimes twice a day. So why would she need to make stream of consciousness tapes for him? In 2005, Miner released the notes to the LA Times. They treated it as a major feature story—posing no serious questions to the attorney. And the point here is that Miner told three stories about when he composed these notes. Here is the second problem inherent with Greenson:  if the doctor made Miner promise not to reveal their contents, why would he let him take contemporaneous notes? That would indicate Miner intended to make them public, which would be a violation of doctor/patient privilege. So Miner switched to, well, he did not make them in Greenson’s presence, but later; he made them many years after. But then, how could one recall them that closely? (McGovern, p. 461).

It turned out—as it almost always does—there was a cash motive behind Miner’s late arrival on the Monroe scene. In 1995, Miner had attempted to sell his notes to Vanity Fair. But in that version, he had only a few pages on a legal pad, which implies he made no contemporaneous notes and it is unlikely that he did them the same day (Lois Banner, Marilyn, p. 419; McGovern, pp. 463-64). Even at that, Miner tried to incite a bidding war by saying he had been offered six figures by a competitor. This was obviously not true. But it’s even worse than that. Miner had fallen on hard times. He had been terminated from the DA’s office, had his license suspended—for more than one reason—and declared bankruptcy (McGovern, p. 465; Banner, p. 419). This is why he needed payment for the notes. Further, although he told others he had interviewed Greenson, he likely had not (Banner, p. 419). After further discussion, and further revelations about her history of sexual anecdotes and obsession with enemas, Lois Banner concluded Miner had created the notes himself. Are we to believe that the LA Times did not know any of this in 2005? Miner was also involved in the inquiry—rather the cover up—of the Robert Kennedy assassination. As anyone who reads Lisa Pease’s book on that case, A Lie Too Big to Fail (2018), the alleged assassin of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, could not have killed the senator. Further, Sirhan showed signs of being hypno-programmed that night. The man who all but admitted to hypnotizing Sirhan was William Joseph Bryan. It turned out that when Bryan died, the attorney for his estate turned out to be none other than John Miner. The night of Bryan’s death, Miner sealed Bryan’s home (Pease, pp. 67-69, 446). One of the most telling parts of Murder Orthodoxies is when McGovern uses the calendars of President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy and matches them with the two Monroe day-by-day books previously mentioned (pp. 176-86). Monroe met Robert Kennedy four times, each time was in public with other people around. President Kennedy met with Monroe on three occasions. At one of those occasions, in March of 1962 at Bing Crosby’s desert estate, there is plausible evidence they had some kind of dalliance. And that is it. Biographers Randy Taraborrelli and Gary Vitacco-Robles agree with this record.

McGovern addresses the questions that people like Margolis and Wolfe have posed about the autopsy. It was not uncommon to have ingested the pills Monroe did and not have them show up as residue in the stomach. Simply because Monroe’s stomach was empty and the organ keeps on working until the subject has passed on (McGovern, p. 483). Also, the manufacturer of Nembutal used a color dye that did not bleed from the gelatin capsules once swallowed, which explains why no dyes were found in her stomach (ibid, p. 482). Not only did Wecht agree with Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy, so did Dr. Boyd Stevens for the DA’s office review of the case in 1982. McGovern also proves through the barbiturate levels in Monroe’s liver and blood that she was not injected or given a “hot shot”. Today, Monroe’s doctors would have been placed on trial for their irresponsible overprescribing of pills and also for the dangerous combination the prescriptions created: Nembutal, Chloral Hydrate, Librium, Phenergan, and Triavil. The two drugs that killed her are the first two. Donald McGovern has written a quite commendable book. One that swims against some sick cultural tides. As he shows, no one was “protecting the Kennedys.” Those who used that rubric were engaging in the most outrageous practices of evidence manipulation and character assassination; not just of the Kennedys, but of Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was not a Mafia moll, nor was she a high level intelligence agent. McGovern has shown these to be part of a ludicrous and unfounded sideshow. There is a standard in writing nonfiction: sensational charges necessitate sensational evidence. That rule was completely discarded in this field a long time ago, specifically by money-grubbing Norman Mailer. This opened the door to the likes of Slatzer, Grandison, Heyman, Margolis, Wolfe, Smathers... supporting and aggrandizing each other. Don McGovern’s book applies the torch to their circus tent. Source: kennedysandking.com

Friday, June 26, 2020

"Blonde", Marilyn Monroe, The Search for JFK

Finally we are being shown the most expected images of Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. Months after we knew that the cuban actress was going to play the ambition blonde, the filming began. Ana de Armas is in charge of interpreting the ill-fated actress in the adaptation of Netflix’s acclaimed novel Blonde, written by Joyce Carol Oates and directed by Andrew Dominik. Filming of the film began in August, with Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale and Julianne Nicholson among the newly added cast members.

Ana de Armas, who has been photographed on the set of the shoot, she has a remarkable resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, a character that was already played in the film by Michelle Williams in My week with Marilyn, which earned him the Golden Globe for best actress, or by other actresses such as Kelli Garner or Theresa Russell in Insignificance (1985) directed by Nicholas Roeg. For this role, Ana de Armas had to channel Norma Jeane Mortenson and if the newly released images are anything to go by, she is going to truly embody the icon. Netflix has yet to announce a release date for “Blonde.” Source: www.thenational.ae

When best-selling author David Heymann's last book, Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love, came out, Kirkus Reviews said it was "a well-researched story". The popular Canadian magazine Maclean's praised Heymann's research, finding "his sources credible." The publisher, a subsidiary of media behemoth CBS, says Joe and Marilyn tells "the riveting true story" of the lusty, tempestuous and brief marriage between the Yankees slugger and the iconic actress. In May 2012, Heymann fell dead in the lobby of his New York City apartment building, but that presented no problem for his publisher, according to Emily Bestler, who edited his last four books. Bestler's mood changed when I told her I wanted to discuss numerous fabrications Newsweek had uncovered in Joe and Marilyn. She cut me off in mid-sentence, shouting that such questions were improper. She then declared that "this is getting ugly" and hung up. It's too bad CBS didn't want to hear more, because all the celebrity bios Heymann wrote for them—dealing with JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe—are riddled with errors and fabrications. An exhaustive cataloging of those mistakes would fill a new book. Heymann described a woman called Susan Sklover who worked as a White House masseuse while JFK was president. Heymann also describes President Kennedy's evaluation of Sklover as an "ordinary lover"—without any indication of how Heymann could have known this. Heymann wrote that Sklover's name was kept out of Secret Service logbooks, a variation of an assertion in his other books to explain his reliance on people for whom no records exist. Brown University, in an email, said it has no record of any student named Susan Sklover. An exhaustive search of public records turned up two women named Susan Sklover, who are aware of each other, but know no one else with that name. Both said they never spoke to Heymann or any researcher. Neither attended Brown, knew JFK Jr. or worked at the White House. The women were born in 1954 and 1960, which meant they were both children during the Kennedy administration. When a red flag is raised, publishers have an obligation to their readers to investigate. And when a sea of red flags floods their lobby, they need to start pulping the fiction. Source: www.newsweek.com

About the evolution of these "JFK scandal stories" over a number of years, people whose presence should have caused alarm bells to go off with intelligent observers are: Frank Capell, Robert Loomis, Ovid Demaris, Liz Smith, James Angleton, Timothy Leary, etc. These people who had agendas in mind when they got into this racket. Others, like Robert Slatzer or Ted Jordan, were just money grubbing hustlers. But the net effect is that by reinforcing each other, they became a business racket, a network creating its own echo chamber. A series of anti-Kennedy biographies began. That Marilyn Monroe's death was caused by her "involvement" with the Kennedys became a rather peculiar cottage industry. Egged on by advocates of Judith Exner (e.g. Liz Smith and Anthony Summers), this political and cultural time bomb landed in Seymour Hersh's and ABC's lap. When it blew up, all parties went into a damage control mode, pointing their fingers at each other. As we examine the sorry history of these industries, we shall see that there is plenty of blame (and shame) to be shared. The first anti-Kennedy book in this brood, although not quite a perfect fit into the genre, is The Search for JFK, by Joan and Clay Blair Jr. 

The book appeared in 1976, right after Watergate and the Church Committee hearings. First of all, the authors apparently accept the Washington Post version of Watergate–i.e. that Nixon, and only Nixon, was responsible for that whole range of malfeasance and that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got to the bottom of it. The Blairs spend much of their time delving into two areas of Kennedy's personal life: his health problems and his relationships with the opposite sex. Concerning the first, they chronicle many, if not all, of the myriad of unfortunate medical problems afflicting JFK. Previous to this book, the public did not know that Kennedy's back problem was congenital. Second, the book certifies that Kennedy was a victim of Addison's disease, which attacks the adrenal glands and makes them faulty in hormone secretion. The condition can be critical in fights against certain infections and times of physical stress. I exaggerate only slightly when I write that the Blairs treat this episode as if Kennedy was the first discovered victim of AIDS. They attempt to excuse the melodrama by saying that Kennedy and his circle disguised the condition by passing it off as an "adrenal insufficiency." Clearly, Kennedy wanted to hide a rare and misunderstood disease that he knew his political opponents would distort and exaggerate in order to destroy him, which is just what LBJ and John Connally attempted to do in 1960.

The second major area of focus is Kennedy's sex life. The authors reference to Judith Exner, Mary Meyer, and perhaps Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy seems to have been attractive to females. He was appreciative of their overtures. There seems to me to be nothing extraordinary about this. Here we have the handsome, tall, witty, charming son of a millionaire who is going places. If he did not react positively to all the attention heaped on him, I am sure his critics would begin to suggest a "certain latent homosexual syndrome." But what makes this (lengthy) aspect of the book interesting is that when the Blairs ask some of Kennedy's girlfriends what his "style" was (clearly looking for juicy sex details), the answer often is surprising. For instance, in an interview with Charlotte McDonnell, she talks about Kennedy in warm and friendly terms adding that there was "No sex or anything" in their year long relationship. Another Kennedy girlfriend, the very attractive Angela Greene had this to say: Q: Was he romantically pushy? A: I don't think so. I never found him physically aggressive, if that's what you mean. He was adorable and sweet. In another instance, years later, Kennedy was dating the beautiful Barbara Beckwith. She invited Kennedy up to her apartment after he had wined and dined her. There was champagne and low music on the radio. But then a news broadcast came on and JFK leaped up, ran to the radio, and turned up the volume to listen to it. Offended, Beckwith threw him out. The Blairs' book established some paradigms that would be followed in the anti-Kennedy genre. First, and probably foremost, is the influence of Kennedy's father in his career. In fact, Joe Kennedy's hovering presence over all his children is a prime motif of the book. The second theme that will be followed is the aforementioned female associations. The third repeating pattern the Blairs' established is the use of Kennedy's health problems as some kind of character barometer.

John H. Davis writes the following: Kennedy met on April 20, 1962, with a Cuban involved in the unsuccessful underworld Castro assassination plot, a meeting that was not discovered until the Senate Committee on Intelligence found out about it in 1975. That Kennedy could have met with this individual, without knowing what his mission had been, seems inconceivable. Imagine the images conjured up by this passage to a reader who has not read the report. I had read the report and I thought I had missed something. How did I forget about Kennedy's private meeting with Tony Varona in the Oval office? JFK asks Varona why he couldn't get at Castro and says 'try it again.' When I turned to page 124 in the report, I saw why I didn't remember it. The meeting, as described by Davis, did not occur. At the real meeting are John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, General Lyman "and other Administration officials." Also in the room "were several members of Cuban groups involved in the Bay of Pigs." The report makes clear that this was the beginning of the general review of the Bay of Pigs operation that would, within three weeks, result in the Taylor Review Board which would then recommend reforms in CIA control of covert operations. But there is no Tony Varona and there is no hint that anything about the assassination of Castro was discussed.

I must point out Davis' discussion of JFK's Vietnam policy. In his hands, Kennedy turns into a hawk on Vietnam. Davis writes that on July 17, 1963, Kennedy made "his last public utterance" on Vietnam, saying that the U.S. was going to stay there and win (p.374). But on September 2, 1963, in his interview with Walter Cronkite, Kennedy states that the war is the responsibility of "the people of Vietnam, against the Communists." In other words, they have to win the war, not Americans. Davis makes no mention of this. Davis similarly ignores NSAM 111 in which Kennedy refused to admit combat troops into the war, integral to any escalation plan, and NSAM 263, which ordered a withdrawal to be completed in 1965. This last was published in the New York Times (11/16/63), so Davis could have easily found it had he been looking. In light of this selective presentation of the record on Vietnam, plus the acrobatic contortions performed on the Church Committee report, one has to wonder about Davis' intent in doing the book. I question his assertion that when he began the book he "did not have a clear idea where it would lead." So I was not surprised that in addition to expanding Exner's story, he uncritically accepted the allegations about Mary Meyer and Marilyn Monroe. It is interesting in this regard to note that Davis devotes many pages to JFK's assassination. He writes that Kennedy died at the "hands of Lee Harvey Oswald and possible co-conspirators". Going even further, he can state that: It would be a misstatement to assert that Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach and the members of the Warren Commission consciously sought to cover up evidence pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As the declassified record now shows (Vol. 4 #6 "Gerald Ford: Accessory after the Fact") this is just plain wrong. Davis then tries to insinuate any cover-up was brought on by either a backfiring of the Castro plots (Davis p. 454) or JFK's dalliance with Exner (p. 498). As wrongheaded and against the declassified record as this seems, this argument still has adherents, e. g. Martin Waldron and Tom Hartman. They refine it into meaning that the Kennedys had some kind of secret plan to invade Cuba in the offing at the time of the assassination. This ignores the Church Committee report, which shows that by 1963, Kennedy had lost faith in aggression and was working toward accommodation with Castro.

In their approach to JFK, Collier and Horowitz take up where the Blairs left off. In fact, they play up the playboy angle even more strongly than the Blairs. Both authors have advanced degrees from Berkeley. Both say they had done some solid academic work in their Ramparts days. Yet neither has any qualms about questioning the Judith Exner or Mary Meyer stories. After contemplating these stories, I thought to myself that JFK was never this open to his girlfriends. Perhaps maybe with Inga Arvad, who he wanted to marry, but very few others. So I flipped back to see who the source was. The footnote read "Authors' interview with Priscilla McMillan." I then remembered that, by this time, Priscilla had been classified by the CIA as a "witting collaborator." I also recalled that years later, Priscilla changed her "Platonic" relationship with JFK for the National Enquirer. She was now saying that young Jack Kennedy had actually made a pass at her.

A Question of Character, But Not Kennedy's: Which brings us to Thomas Reeves. By the nineties, the negative literature on the Kennedys had multiplied so much that it was possible just to put it all together and make a compendium of it. In 1991, Reeves did just that with his book A Question of Character. It obediently follows the path paved by its noted predecessors. In fact, many of his footnotes are from Davis, Collier and Horowitz. Although Reeves is another Ph. D., he never questions the faulty methodology the previous authors used. On the contrary, by ignoring the primary sources, he can actually state that JFK authorized the Castro plots, and that John H Davis is authoritative on the issue. Predictably, he completely buys into Exner's story and, like Liz Smith, tries to portray her as a victim of the Kennedy protecting "liberal media" (p. 424). He even endorses the Kitty Kelley 1988 People update of Exner's story, finding no inconsistencies between that and the 1977 installment. Any scholar who compromises this much, must have an axe to grind. So how ideological is Reeves? He tries to imply that Lasky's book on JFK, published in 1963, was banned shortly after Kennedy's death by the "liberal media". What he doesn't say is that it was reprinted in 1966. Reeves' method here is to basically combine the Davis book with the Collier-Horowitz book. From the former Reeves repeats the notion that Kennedy was a Cold Warrior not very different from Eisenhower or Nixon. Like Davis, Reeves performs gymnastics with the Cuba and Vietnam record in order to proffer this notion. In fact, Reeves is so intent on pommeling JFK that, at times, he reverses field and actually uses Bruce Miroff's Pragmatic Illusions, a leftist critique of the New Frontier, as a source. As Jim Garrison once noted, the more one scratches at these Minutemen types, the more their intelligence connections appear. James Spada quotes TV director Paul Wurtzel asking Peter Lawford "Did Oswald kill Kennedy or was it higher up?," Lawford (who was usually pretty cautious about the Kennedys) said, "It was higher up." Frank Capell had worked for the government in World War II, but was convicted on charges of eliciting bribes from contractors. After the war, in the Red Scare era, Capell began publishing a Red baiting newsletter, The Herald of Freedom. 

It was this experience that put him in a good position to pen his murderous smear of Bobby Kennedy. For as Donald Spoto reveals in his brilliant book of Marilyn Monroe, one of the people who relentlessly pushed Capell's fabricated smear was fellow FBI asset, Hoover crony, and Hollywood Red baiter Walter Winchell. William Sullivan (FBI Assistant in COINTELPRO) called Bobby a near-Puritan and then added: The stories about Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were just stories. The original story was invented by a so-called journalist, a right-wing zealot who had a history of spinning wild yarns. It spread like wildfire, of course, and J. Edgar Hoover was right there, gleefully fanning the flames. (The Bureau: My thirty years in Hoover's FBI, William C. Sullivan, 1979). The Capell/Winchell/Hoover triangle sowed the seeds of this slander. But the exposure of this triangle does even more. In the Vanity Fair article in which Judith Exner dumped out the latest installment of her strange saga, Liz Smith revealed that she was an apprentice under Walter Winchell in New York (January 1997 p. 32). This may explain why she took up her mentor's cudgel. Capell's work is, as Spoto notes in his Afterword, a frightful piece of reactionary paranoia. But there are two details in his pat anti-Kennedy tract that merit mention. First, Capell is probably the first to propagate the idea that RFK was indirectly responsible for his brother's murder. He does this by saying (p. 52), that commie sympathizer Bobby called off the investigation of the shooting of General Edwin Walker in April of 1963, thus allowing that crazed Communist Oswald to kill JFK. What makes it so fascinating is that, through the FBI's own files, we now have evidence that Capell was deliberately creating a fiction: he had actual information that Oswald was not a communist, but a CIA agent.

Spoto notes that on August 3, 1962, Dorothy Kilgallen printed an item in her column saying that Marilyn was "vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio". Spoto notes the source for Kilgallen's story as Howard Rothberg, the man named in the memo. This is interesting for more than one reason. First, Spoto writes that Rothberg was "a New York interior designer with no connection at all to Marilyn or her circle." This means that he was likely getting his "information" through a third, unnamed source. This is extraordinary. Anyone who has jousted with the FBI or CIA knows how difficult it is to get "sources and methods" revealed. In fact this is one of the big battles the ARRB had to fight with the FBI. Yet in this document, both the method and the source are open. But interestingly, right after Kilgallen printed her vague allusion, Winchell began his steady drumbeat of rumors until, as Spoto notes, he essentially printed Capell's whole tale. Rothberg was either a witting or unwitting conduit to the media for either Hoover or Angleton (or both). The quick Winchell follow-up would argue for Hoover. The Director would want someone else to lead the story before his man Winchell pushed it to the limit. Capell was drawn up on charges in 1965. The charges were rather fatal to the tales told in his RFK pamphlet. One would have thought this discreditation would enough to impale the slanderous tales. And it probably would have been had it not been for Norman Mailer. 

In 1973, Mailer published a book, Marilyn, (really a photo essay) with the assistance of longtime FBI asset on the Kennedy assassination Larry Schiller. He recirculated these tales again, inserting a new twist. He added the possibility that the FBI and/or the CIA might have been involved in the murder in order to blackmail Bobby Kennedy. In 1973, pre-Rupert Murdoch, the media had some decent standards. In fact, Mailer was excoriated for his baseless ruminations. In private, he admitted he wrote it to help pay off a tax debt. Mailer also made a confession in public. When Mike Wallace asked him on 60 Minutes why he had to trash Bobby Kennedy, Mailer replied "I needed money very badly." In 1993, Donald Spoto wrote his revealing bio of Monroe. After reading the likes of Haspiel, Slatzer and Summers, picking up Spoto is like going back into one's home after it has been fumigated. Spoto is a very experienced biographer who is not shy about controversy. His biographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Laurence Olivier reveal sides of their personalities that they tried to conceal. Spoto is also quite thorough in obtaining and then pouring over primary sources. Finally, he respects himself and his subject, which allows him to question sources before arriving at a judgment on someone's credibility. This last quality allowed him to arrive at what is the most satisfactory conclusion about the death of Monroe: accidental overdose (Spoto pp. 566-593). And the Kennedys had nothing to do with it. I do appreciate Spoto's good research, fine writing, and a clear dedication to truth. If any reader is interested in the real facts of Marilyn Monroe's life and death, this is the book to read.

Mega-Trasher, or Just Mega-Trash? Hersh's book promises to be the mega "trash Kennedy" book. And, like any hatchet man, Hersh tries to disguise his mission. In the Vanity Fair article, his fellow workers on the ABC documentary say, "there have been moments when, while recounting private acts of kindness by JFK, Hersh has broken down and wept." This from a man who intimidated witnesses with his phony papers and waved them aloft while damning the Kennedys with them. Robert Anson's article begs the next question: Who is Hersh? As is common knowledge, the story that made Hersh's career was his series of articles on the massacre of civilians at the village of My Lai in Vietnam. Hersh then wrote two books on this atrocity: My Lai 4 and Cover Up. There have always been questions about both the orders given on that mission and the unsatisfactory investigation after the fact. These questions began to boil in the aftermath of the exposure of the Bill Colby/Ted Shackley directed Phoenix Program: the deliberate assassination of any Vietnamese suspected of being a Viet Cong. These questions were even more intriguing in light of the fact that the man chosen to run the military review of the massacre, General Peers, had a long term relationship with the CIA. In fact, former Special Forces Captain John McCarthy told me that–in terms of closeness to the Agency–Peers was another Ed Lansdale. Domestic ops were banned by the CIA's original charter, although they had been done ever since that Agency's inception. But at Christmas, 1974, Hersh's stories were splashed all over the Times. Hersh won a Pulitzer for them. One would think this would be a strong indication of Hersh's independence from, even antagonism for the CIA. One would be wrong. As everyone familiar with the Agency's history knows, in 1974 there was a huge turf war going on between Angleton and Colby (formerly of the Vietnam Phoenix program). 

Which brings us to the nineties. Everyone knows that the broad release of Oliver Stone's JFK in 1992 put the Kennedy assassination back into play. The pre-release attack against the film was unprecedented in movie history. That's because it was more than just a movie. It was a message, with powerful political overtones that dug deeply into the public psyche: a grand political conspiracy had killed the last progressive president. That Vietnam would have never happened if Kennedy had lived. That JFK was working for accommodation with Castro at the time of his death. That the country has not really been the same since. The preemptive strike was successful in slowing up the film's momentum out of the starting block. But the movie did increase the number of people who believe the case was a conspiracy into the ninety-percent range. The following year, in anticipation of the 30th anniversary of the murder, Gerald Posner got the jump on the critics with his specious book on the case. The media hailed him as a truth-teller. The critics were shut out. No nonfiction book in recent memory ever received such a huge publicity campaign as Posner's–and deserved it less. This blurring of tabloid and journalistic standards inevitably leads to a blurring of history. Disinformation feeds on disinformation, and whatever the record shows is shunted aside as the tabloid version becomes "accepted history," to use Davis' phrase (p. 290). But beyond this, there is an even larger gestalt. If the Kennedys were just shady types or CIA hawks, then what difference does it make in history if they were assassinated? For the CIA, this is as good as a rerun of the Warren Commission, since the net results are quite similar. The standard defense by these purveyors is that they go on the offense. 

Anyone who objects to their peculiar blend of misinformation, or questions their sources or intent is labeled as "protecting the Kennedys," or a "disappointed Kennedy fan". Tactically, this is a great cover to avoid the questionable credibility of people like Joseph Alsop, Priscilla Johnson McMillan or Robert Slatzer. It also avoids acknowledging their descent into the ranks of Hoover and Angleton. So Where are the Kennedys? In a deeper sense, it is clear now that no one in the major media was or is "protecting the Kennedys." The anti-Kennedy genre has now become self-sustaining. Anthony Summers used the Collier and Horowitz book for Goddess (2007). 

Summers even uses Priscilla McMillan to connect JFK with Monroe! (p. 244) Will Liz Smith call him on this? Will Ben Bradlee? Far from "protecting the Kennedys" the establishment shields these writers from potentially devastating critiques. The reason being that the Kennedys were never part of that establishment. No one protected JFK in Dallas. No one protected RFK in Los Angeles. The ensuing investigations did everything they could to protect the true murderers. People like Slatzer, Davis, and now Hersh have made their living off of it. The Kennedys have sustained many tragedies. Andy Harland called up Steve Jones after reading his article in The Humanist (Probe Vol. 4 #3 p. 8). He was an acquaintance of Peter Lawford's who talked to him a few times about the assassination. Jones' notes from that phone call includes the following: Lawford told him that Jackie knew right away that shots came from the front as did Powers and O'Donnell. He said shortly after the funeral the family got together.... Bobby told the family that it was a high level military/CIA plot and that he felt powerless to do anything about it.... the family always felt that JFK's refusal to commit to Vietnam was one of the reasons for the assassination.... Lawford told him that the kids were all told the truth as they grew up but it was Teddy who insisted that the family put the thing to rest. The Kennedys are silent; they won't sue, so if it's in print it must be true. As a corollary, this shows that the old adage about history being written by the victors stands. In this upside down milieu, all the Kennedys' sworn enemies can talk to any cheapjack writer with a hefty advance and recycle another thrashing. Mobsters, CIA officers and their assets, rabid right-wingers and criminals. Escorted by these opportunist writers, they now do their dances over the graves of the two men they hated most in life and can now revile in death. There is something very Orwellian about this of course.

The image of JFK on national television giving hell to the steel companies; of Kennedy staking out his policy for detente at American Universities; of RFK grilling Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa; of Bobby going through the personnel list at the State Department to be sure there was no Dulles still on the payroll; these images have to be erased. Most of all, the RFK of 1965-68, angry at the perversion of his brother's policies, must be subverted. Who of the elite would want people to remember RFK saying these words: What the Alliance for Progress has come down to then is that the native rulers can close down newspapers, abolish Congress, fight religious opposition, and deport your political enemies, and you'll get lots of help, but if you fool around with a U.S. oil company, we'll cut you off without a penny. Is that right? By 1963, after the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis and the cries for escalation in Vietnam, JFK was moving toward the Sorenson-Schlesinger side of the White House. By 1968, RFK was further to the left than that, being hooked up with labor leaders like Walter Reuther and Cesar Chavez. As Otis Chandler, a firm member of the establishment, said after Bobby's death: "I guess there's no one to stand up for the weak and the poor now." That memory is now being replaced by those of RFK cavorting with Monroe on the beach; of JFK drinking martinis with Monroe; and the Kennedys trying to take Castro down. In the Anson piece, Hersh talks about changing the way people think about the Kennedys. Talk about reversing the Church Committee. These people could teach Orwell something. What will the future bring? Will Hersh now say that he was duped on the Monroe docs but now he has the real McCoy: it was Jayne Mansfield all along. With Liz Smith as the moderator, satire is impossible in this field.

But down deep, submerged but still present, there is a resistance to all this. The public knows something is wrong. CBS and the New York Times conducted a poll which asked the respondents: If you could pick a President, any President, which one would you choose to run the country today? The winner, in a landslide, was John F. Kennedy who doubled the tally of the second place finisher. In 1988, Rolling Stone surveyed the television generation, i.e. the below forty group, on their diverse opinions and attitudes. Their two most admired public leaders were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, dead twenty years before, when many of those polled were infants or not even born. This holds not just in America. In Pete Hammill's 1995 book Piece of Work, he relates an episode in his life when his car broke down in the Mexican countryside. He walked to a poor, "Third World" style hut which had no amenities except a phone. Before he left, he thanked the native Mexicans who lived there and took a look around the dilapidated, almost bare interior, featuring a frame photo of John F. Kennedy. It's that international Jungian consciousness, however bottled up, ambiguous, uncertain, that must be dislodged. In a sense, this near-maniacal effort, and all the money and effort involved in it, is a compliment that proves the opposite of the position being advanced. This kind of defamation effort is reserved only for the most dangerous foes of the status quo, as Thomas Jefferson or Huey Long. In a weird sort of way, it almost makes one feel for the other side. It must be tough trying to control any ghosts rising from the ashes. Which, of course, is why Hersh has to hide his real feelings about his subject. That's the kind of threat the Kennedys posed to the elite: JFK was never part from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); Bobby Kennedy hated the Rockefellers (Thy Will be Done pp. 538-542). For those sins, and encouraging others to follow them, they must suffer the fate of the Undead. And Marilyn Monroe must be thrown into that half-world with them. At the hands of Bob Loomis' pal, that "liberal" crusader Seymour Hersh. As Robert Anson (Vanity Fair editor) says, Hersh must just want the money. My feeling is that people who have perverted the historical record have, in an inexcusable way, pardoned the murderers. Source: kennedysandking.com