The Garrison Tapes, Camelot and the Kennedy's mystique, Political Satire: Bulworth

Douglas Caddy: This morning (08/06/020) I had a cup of coffee at a donut shop in Houston with a friend, Philip Dyer. I casually mentioned to him that I had recently viewed The JFK Assassination: The Garrison Tapes directed by John Barbour and I was impressed with his work. Phil then told me that he had met Clay Shaw in New Orleans sometime after Shaw had been found innocent by the jury in the trial brought by Garrison. This occurred while Phil was visiting his close friend, Bill Howard, who was New Orleans' premier interior decorator, and Howard invited him to join an unnamed friend that he planned to have breakfast with. Upon arrival at the restaurant Howard surprised Phil by introducing him Clay Shaw who was already seated. Phil said that Shaw was impeccably dressed and had piercing blue eyes. Because Howard was a close friend of Shaw and Phil was a close friend of Howard, Shaw was relaxed in his conversation at breakfast. So Phil decided to ask him whether he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. Phil told me that Shaw replied, "I knew Lee very, very well." Phil then asked Shaw whether he believed Oswald killed President Kennedy. Shaw replied, "You need to know that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy." Later that day Howard invited Phil to join him in attending a party at the residence of Tennessee Williams. Phil said they walked from Howard's residence in the French Quarter to Williams' house that had an immense back yard of grass, so it was likely in the nearby Garden District.

Phil said there were a hundred people at the party and they were the most beautiful people he had ever seen. I remarked to Phil that it was tragic the way Tennessee Williams later died swallowing a bottle cap that got lodged in his windpipe in his throat. It is amazing how some celebrities leave this world. Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack while having sex with a young woman, Andy Warhol died of neglect in New York Hospital, and Dorothy Kilgallen allegedly died of a drug overdose but more likely of murder. So just add Tennessee Williams to the list. Phil Dyer is my closest friend in Houston. I have known him for years. He had told me this story before several times but it wasn't until I listened to The Garrison Tapes recently that I realized the significance of it. Phil is extremely intelligent and I said to him that what he had told me about meeting Clay Shaw and what Shaw had said made him a supremely important witness to history. I do not know whether Phil at this late stage in his life is willing to go public with what he knows and as a result become a public figure with all the headache and controversy that goes with that. I do think he would be agreeable to having a phone conversation with Jim DiEugenio so that Jim as a historian would be able to vouch later as to what Phil told me in the conversation. Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

Jill Abramson, New York Times’s executive editor: An estimated 40,000 books about JFK have been published since his death. Readers can choose from many books but surprisingly few good ones, and, maybe with the exception of JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass, not really outstanding ones. It is a curious state of affairs, and some of the nation’s leading historians wonder about it. “There is such fascination in the country about the 50th anniversary, but there is no a great book about Kennedy,” Robert Caro lamented. The situation is all the stranger since Kennedy’s life and death form “one of the great American stories.” Caro should know. His epic biography of Lyndon B. Johnson brilliantly captures parts of the Kennedy saga, especially the assassination in Dallas, revisited in the latest installment, “The Passage of Power.”

Robert Dallek, the author of “An Unfinished Life,” probably the best single-volume Kennedy biography, suggests that the cultish atmosphere surrounding, and perhaps smothering the actual man may be the reason for the deficit of good writing about him. “The mass audience has turned Kennedy into a celebrity, so historians are not really impressed by him,” Dallek told me. His own book included a good deal of fresh information on Kennedy’s severe health problems and their cover-up by those closest to him. Dallek is also good on the fairy-tale aspects of the Kennedy family history, and he closely examines the workings of the Kennedy White House. Indeed, a dolorous mood of “what might have been” hangs over a good deal of writing about Kennedy. Arriving in time for November 22 was the aptly titled “If Kennedy Lived. The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History,” by the television commentator Jeff Greenfield, who imagines a completed first Kennedy term and then a second. This isn’t new territory for Greenfield, who worked for Kennedy’s brother Robert and is the author of a previous book of presidential “what ifs” called “Then Everything Changed.”

Thurston Clarke, the author of two previous and quite serviceable books on the Kennedys, also dwells on fanciful “what might have beens” in “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” suggesting that the death of the presidential couple’s last child, Patrick, brought the grieving parents closer together and may have signaled the end of Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing. What’s more, Clarke makes a giant leap about Kennedy as leader, arguing that in the final 100 days he was becoming a great president. One example, according to Clarke, was his persuading the conservative Republicans Charles Halleck, the House minority leader, and Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, to support a civil rights bill. Once re-elected, Kennedy would have pushed the bill through Congress. Bad books by celebrity authors shouldn’t surprise us, even when the subject is an American president. The true mystery in Kennedy’s case is why, 50 years after his death, highly accomplished writers seem unable to fix him on the page.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote three magisterial volumes on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, attempted a similar history in “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.” Published in 1965, it has the virtues of immediacy, since Schlesinger, Kennedy’s Harvard contemporary, had been on the White House staff, brought in as court historian. He witnessed many of the events he describes. In 1993, the political journalist Richard Reeves wrote “President Kennedy: Profile of Power”, a minutely detailed chronicle of the Kennedy's White House. As a primer on Kennedy’s decision-making, like his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis, the book is fascinating. What’s missing is a picture of Kennedy’s personal life, though Reeves includes a passing mention of Marilyn Monroe being sewn into the $5,000 flesh-colored, skintight dress she wore to celebrate the president’s birthday at Madison Square Garden in 1962. 

Balancing out, or warring with, the Kennedy claque are the Kennedy haters, like Seymour M. Hersh and Garry Wills. In “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Hersh wildly posits dubious connections between the Kennedys and the mob. The sum total of this oddly polarized literature is a kind of void. Other presidents, good and bad, have been served well by biographers and historians. We have first-rate books on Jefferson, on Lincoln, on Wilson, on both Roosevelts. Even unloved presidents have received major books: Lyndon B Johnson (Caro) and Richard Nixon (Wills). Kennedy, the odd man out, still seeks his true biographer. Why is this the case? One reason is that even during his lifetime, Kennedy defeated or outwitted the most powerfully analytic and intuitive minds. In November 1960, Esquire magazine commissioned Norman Mailer’s first major piece of political journalism, asking him to report on the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that nominated Kennedy. Mailer’s long virtuoso article, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” came as close as any book or essay ever has to capturing Kennedy’s essence, though that essence, Mailer candidly acknowledged, was enigmatic.

Here was a 43-year-old man whose irony and grace were keyed to the national temper in 1960. Kennedy’s presence and light was at once soothing and disruptive. He carried himself “with a cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause, his manner somehow similar to the poise of a fine boxer, quick with his hands, neat in his timing, and two feet away from his corner when the bell ended the round.” Finally, however, “there was an elusive detachment to everything he did. One did not have the feeling of a man present in the room with all his weight and all his mind.” Mailer himself doesn’t know “whether to admire this elusiveness, or to beware of it. One could be witnessing the fortitude of a superior sensitivity or the detachment of a man who was not quite real to himself.” And yet Kennedy’s unreality, in Mailer’s view, may have answered the particular craving of a particular historical moment. “It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradiction and mysteries which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation.”

Those words seemed to prophesy the Kennedy mystique that was to come, reinforced by the whisker-thin victory over Nixon in the general election, by the romantic excitements of Camelot and then by the horror of Dallas. Over fifty years later we are still sifting through the facts of the assassination. Among the more ambitious is “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination,” a work of more than 500 pages. Its author, Philip Shenon, a former New York Times reporter, uncovered a new lead, in the person of a heretofore overlooked woman who may have had suspicious ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. But when Shenon finds the woman, now in her 70s, in Mexico, she denies having had a relationship with Oswald, and Shenon’s encounters with her prove more mysterious than illuminating. Kennedy’s murder was bound to attract novelists, and some have approached the subject inventively, if with strange results. Stephen King’s “11/22/63,” a best seller published in 2011, takes the form of a time-travel romp involving a high school English teacher who finds romance in Texas while keeping tabs on Oswald. At more than 800 pages, the novel demands a commitment that exceeds its entertainment value. Most critics seem to think the outstanding example of Kennedy assassination fiction is “Libra,” Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel, published in 1988. The narrative is indeed taut and bracing. But the challenge DeLillo set for himself, to provide readers with “a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years,” exceeds even his lavish gifts.

Kennedy may have enjoyed the company of writers, but the long history of secrecy and mythmaking has surely contributed to the paucity of good books. In recent years, the protective seal seems to have loosened. The Kennedy family, including Edward Kennedy and his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, gave unfettered access to their father’s papers to David Nasaw, the author of “The Patriarch,” a well-received biography of Joseph P. Kennedy. Caroline Kennedy has been open to the claims of history and was involved in the publication of two books and the release of accompanying tapes. One of them, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy,” contains the transcripts of the first lady’s interviews about her husband with Schlesinger, conducted in 1964 but kept secret until 2011. Unfortunately, the tapes of William Manchester’s two five-hour interviews with Jackie Kennedy, who seems to have regretted her frankness, remain under seal at the Kennedy Library until 2067. This is a final sadness for a reader sifting through these many books. Taken together, they tell us all too little about this president, who remains as elusive in death as he was in life. Source: nytimes.com

The House of Kennedy (2020), written by James Patterson and Cynthia Fagen, does something I would have thought no writer could possibly do in 2020. In the long section dealing with JFK, I detected not even the mention of the Vietnam conflict. This is astonishing—for two reasons. First, there have been many important documents released by the National Archives that help define President Kennedy’s intentions and policies in Vietnam. If the authors did not want to read those documents—and it’s pretty clear whoever the team was behind this product did not—then there were books based on those documents that one could consult. Patterson and Fagen did not do that either. How on earth can anyone write any kind of biography of John Kennedy, or description of his presidency, and leave that subject out?

Also, you will not learn anything about what Jack Kennedy did in his 14-year congressional career in this book. That is quite a negative achievement, because author John T. Shaw wrote an entire book about that subject: JFK in the Senate: Pathway to the Presidency (2013). Shaw came to the conclusion that Kennedy’s most important achievement on Capitol Hill was his forging of a new foreign policy toward countries emerging from the bonds of European colonialism. This policy grew directly out of Kennedy’s opposition to what had come before him in the form of both the administrations of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson and that of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. The great schism between Senator John Kennedy and Eisenhower/Dulles came in the form of Kennedy’s famous Algeria speech of 1957. In that speech, the senator denounced the Eisenhower administration’s inability to break away from loyalty to France in the colonial war. John Kennedy said that the White House did not seem to understand that what was going to happen in Algeria was a reprise of what had just happened in 1954 at the siege of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. That is a resounding French defeat, with the USA on the wrong side of history again. Source: kennedysandking.com

Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Chicago Reader): "Warren Beatty sounds off angrily and shrewdly about politics, delivering what is possibly his best film and certainly his funniest and liveliest." Bulworth (1998) is a onetime Kennedy liberal (like Beatty himself), an incumbent senator from California who is accused by an opponent of being "old liberal wine trying to pour himself into a new conservative bottle." Distraught because of his own corruption and the sad state of American politics, Bulworth hires an assassin to kill him, an act that gives Beatty a new lease on life. Invigorated, he sets about appropriating African-American slang and culture, as well as telling "the truth." Beatty directed, produced and co-wrote "Bulworth," and it's doubtful that any other Hollywood power could have put a story like this on the screen or would want to. A shrewd political observer for decades, Beatty has fashioned a hilarious morality tale that delivers a surprisingly potent, angry message beneath the laughs. Hollywood rarely embraces political satire on this level as if it were impolite and would make people uncomfortable but Beatty's lampoon excels as sharp commentary.

The coolest stuff in "Bulworth" happens in the second half when the candidate, having decided that he doesn't want to die after all, romances a young black woman (Halle Berry) and hides out at her family's ghetto residence. Beatty deserves huge credit for pulling off an enterprise as audacious and risky as "Bulworth," for giving such a frisky and intelligent performance, and for drawing the best from his supporting actors: Jack Warden as Bulworth's senior aide, Christine Baranski as his brittle wife, Paul Sorvino as a vicious lobbyist, Don Cheadle as a South Central Los Angeles gang leader and especially Oliver Platt as Bulworth's flustered, bellicose chief operative.

You could call him insane, but if you look at it more romantically, perhaps he is "posessed" by the "spirit" of social justice, a mere vessel for the truths that need to be told. He is a character unaware of the significance in what he is saying. To him, if he's not completely insane, he's simply a man who broke down and decided to tell it like it is (ala Peter Finch in Network). There's even a performance by poet-playwright Amiri Baraka as a homeless muse who resurfaces throughout the film to counsel Bulworth, "You got to be a spirit. You got to sing -- don't be no ghost." That piece of poetry may be the closest Beatty comes to a pure statement here: 'Take control of your life,' he seems to say; 'don't let the system play you for a fool.' Nominee for Best Writing in 1999, Screenplay written directly for the screen by Warren Beatty and Jeremy Pikser, Bulworth is a quintessential example of a 'contemporary classic' for our generation. Source: www.sfgate.com

Is JFK a good movie? Actually, it’s a great movie that looks better with each passing year. JFK has a mad genius, making the ultimate point of that Kennedy may have been murdered as part of an institutional coup d’état by powerful shadowy forces, usurping democracy by preventing citizens from investigating further. Stone keeps bringing the movie back to two men. There’s Jim Garrison, whom JFK paints as a fair, reasonable, good-humored man—trying to run a major investigation on a piddly budget, while seeing his faith in institutions tested many times. And then there’s John Kennedy, whom JFK recognizes as a divisive figure, sparking heated arguments among American citizens. “It’s up to you,” Garrison says directly into the camera at the end of the closing argument of the only major criminal trial related to the Kennedy assassination. But as Stone shows the revolting headshot in the Zapruder film, he also reminds the audience that this is a film about a gifted President whose administration ended horrifically—and undemocratically. If Stone hasn’t exactly solved the Kennedy assassination, he has captured—with a dark cinematic flair that leaves you reeling—why it still looms like a sickening nightmare.  Source: thedissolve.com

American baby boomer's cognitive decline, Psychology of Men & Masculinities

In a reversal of trends, American baby boomers scored lower on a test of cognitive functioning than did members of previous generations, according to a new nationwide study. Findings showed that average cognition scores of adults aged 50 and older increased from generation to generation, beginning with the greatest generation (born 1890-1923) and peaking among war babies (born 1942-1947). Scores began to decline in the early baby boomers (born 1948-1953) and decreased further in the mid baby boomers (born 1954-1959). According to study author Hui Zheng, professor of sociology at The Ohio State University: “It is shocking to see this decline in cognitive functioning among baby boomers after generations of increases in test scores,” Zheng said. “But what was most surprising to me is that this decline is seen in all groups: men and women, across all races and ethnicities and across all education, income and wealth levels.”

Results showed lower cognitive functioning in baby boomers was linked to less wealth, along with higher levels of loneliness, depression, inactivity and obesity, and less likelihood of being married. The study was published online recently in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences. Zheng analyzed data on 30,191 Americans who participated in the Health and Retirement Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan. People over 51 years old were surveyed every two years. As part of the study, participants completed a cognitive test in which they had to recall words they had heard earlier, name objects they were shown and perform other tasks. Other research has shown that overall rates of mortality and illness have increased in baby boomers, but generally found that the highly educated and wealthiest were mostly spared. “That’s why it was so surprising to me to see cognitive declines in all groups in this study,” Zheng said. “Baby boomers already start having lower cognition scores than earlier generations at age 50 to 54,” he said. Zheng looked for clues across the lifetimes of those in the study. Increasing cognition scores in previous generations could be tied to beneficial childhood conditions – conditions that were similar for baby boomers, Zheng said.

Baby boomers’ childhood health was as good as or better than previous generations and they came from families that had higher socioeconomic status. They also had higher levels of education and better occupations. “The decline in cognitive functioning that we’re seeing does not come from poorer childhood conditions,” Zheng said. The biggest factors linked to lower cognition scores among baby boomers in the study were lower wealth, higher levels of self-reported loneliness and depression, lack of physical activity and obesity. Living without a spouse, being married more than once in their lives, having psychiatric problems and cardiovascular risk factors including strokes, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes were also associated with lower cognitive functioning among people in this generation. “If it weren’t for their better childhood health, more favorable family background, more years of education and higher likelihood of having a white-collar occupation, baby boomers would have even worse cognitive functioning,” Zheng said.

There were not enough late baby boomers (born in 1960 or later) to include in this study, but Zheng said he believes they will fare no better. The same might be true for following generations unless we find a solution for the problems found here, he said. While many of the problems linked to lower cognitive functioning are symptoms of modern life, like less connection with friends and family and growing economic inequality, other problems found in this study are unique to the United States, Zheng said. One example would be the lack of universal access and high cost of health care. “Part of the story here are the problems of modern life in the U.S.,” he said. One of the biggest concerns is that cognitive functioning when people are in their 50s and 60s is related to their likelihood of having dementia when they are older. “With the aging population in the United States, we were already likely to see an increase in the number of people with dementia,” Zheng said. “But this study suggests it may be worse than we expected for decades to come.” Source: new.osu.edu

New research suggests that sexual promiscuity negatively impacts social responses toward both gay and straight men. The study, published in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, found that women are more likely to seek to avoid gay men described as promiscuous compared to gay men who are not described as promiscuous. “Perceptions of masculinity, and stereotypes toward gay men, are multifaceted,” said study author Corey Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University. “I was interested in knowing what happens when some of these perceptions overlap; for example, does perceived sexual promiscuity (which is associated with traditional ideas of masculinity) affect perceptions of gay and straight men similarly? These kinds of comparisons can help us understand where these prejudices come from, and hopefully help us find ways to reduce them.” In the study, heterosexual undergraduate students were randomly assigned to report their social attitudes towards either gay men, straight men, gay men who are sexually promiscuous, straight men who are sexually promiscuous, gay men with feminine qualities, straight men with feminine qualities, gay men with masculine qualities, or straight men with very masculine qualities.

To assess their attitudes, the participants were asked how strongly they agreed with statements such as “I would like for a member of this group to work in the same place as I do” and “Members of this group are the kind of people that I tend to avoid.” The researchers found that both female and male participants reported greater social distancing toward gay men than toward straight men. Women also reported greater social distancing toward sexually promiscuous gay men than gay men in general. Men, however, showed no difference in attitude between sexually promiscuous gay men and gay men in general. In addition, Cook and his colleagues found that women reported greater social distancing toward sexually promiscuous straight men compared to all other groups. “One important implication of this research is that attitudes based on sexual behavior can be more nuanced than we often think. Research consistently finds that heterosexual women are generally more accepting of gay men than heterosexual men are. My findings suggest that this is not the case when gay men are explicitly labeled as sexually promiscuous,” Cook told PsyPost.

“Additionally, heterosexual women and men respond negatively toward straight men labeled as sexually promiscuous. This is interesting because heterosexual men have traditionally used ‘sexual prowess’ as a way to boost their status; my research suggests that this tactic might not work as well as men think.” In a second experiment, the researchers found evidence that women’s negativity toward sexually promiscuous gay men was related to concern for disease threats. But perceived disease threat only explained some of the relationship. “One major caveat to these findings is that our data do not fully explain why women responded so negatively toward targets labeled as sexually promiscuous. What is it about sexual promiscuity that elicited such negative reactions from women in our studies?” Cook said. “Also, what perpetuates this “masculine” norm among men if both men and women respond negatively to sexual promiscuity? I hope my findings are interesting enough to motivate other researchers to explore these questions in ways I haven’t yet thought of. I think the timing of this research is fortuitous. We are at a point culturally when people are beginning to ask very important questions about traditional ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality. Maybe findings such as these can help us think of ways to redefine masculinity and help us find healthier ways of perceiving sexuality,” Cook added. Source: www.psypost.org

Raeanne Bartlett: When I think of Jim and Pam's love story, it comes to mind William Shakespeare's words from Shakespeare in Love: “You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die.” Jim Morrison didn't have issues with gay people. He just didn't like them coming onto him, but he wasn't a homophobe. There is a reference of gay Vaya Warren (who can be seen making a brief cameo in the 1978 film Thank God It's Friday) in the interview with Eva Gardonyi from Frank Lisciandro's book "Friends gathered together". Gardonyi recalls that Jim said about Vaya (an acquaintance of Pamela who frequented her boutique Themis): "I tolerate him, but would he ever touch me, I'll kill him". 

Sasha Chermayeff: John had begun his efforts with George magazine. His next goal was to be a New York senator, or possibly governor. And then he would have run for President. One morning on the Vineyard we joked about the election of 2012—he wanted to run in 2012. John thought philosopher Russell Blackford got it right: ‘We need to focus on evidence and arguments, and on ordinary fairness and compassion to others, even when we disagree.’ I don’t think Carolyn controlled John but she probably tried to change his views if she thought it would be in his benefit. I think John could also be controlling. That’s how I see it. He didn’t like her mother or most of her friends, and when they weren’t together one of his friends was reporting him what was she doing. I never heard John saying anything negative about Ann Freeman (Carolyn's mother) directly, he just complained he didn't like how she was whispering to her daughter's ear about how she should live her life. And yes, John didn't get along with Carolyn's friends at all, because I know he didn't click with that type (Fashion & mostly gay crowd), he called those types 'clusterfucks'. Brad Johns (Carolyn's hairdresser from her early fashion days) said John was controlling and he was the reason Carolyn stopped getting her hair done there. John sent a cease and desist letter to Brad Johns because he 'was talking to the press' when all he did was promote his salon using his clientele. Once John threatened Michael Bergin when this guy phoned Carolyn home. I think John also didn't like Gordon Henderson (Carolyn's designer friend) or other people who he felt could have a bad influence on Carolyn. ―"American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr." (2002) by Richard Blow & Richard Bradley

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

The John F. Kennedy Jr. Assassination (2018) by Professor John Koerner

Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr. Assassination (2018) by Professor John Koerner presents evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate the only surviving son of President John F. Kennedy and considers the motives that many powerful forces had to make sure he never set foot in the White House. Divided into two parts, Part One examines the potential motives the C.I.A. and perhaps even Israeli intelligence, had to eliminate JFK Jr. Part Two systematically dismantles the official version of events, that JFK Jr. crashed his plane due to pilot error, and examines both the evidence of a government cover-up at the crime scene, and the extensive eyewitness reports of an explosion that brought the aircraft down. John Koerner is an author of several historical books and a professor of American History at Erie Community College in Williamsville, New York. John Koerner has also appeared on "America's Book of Secrets" on the History Channel.

When trying to prove the existence of a conspiracy it is essential to systematically dismantle the lies that filter into the accepted versions of historical events. It will be my purpose to logically dispel the notion that John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death was nothing more than a tragic accident, and prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the events of July 16, 1999, were instead a skillfully planned assassination. I consider myself in line with Jim DiEugenio, who recently confessed: "The idea that I have made money off of my research on the Kennedy's case is so polar to the facts that its bonkers." John F. Kennedy Jr. was the publisher of a political magazine, George, the loving husband to a beautiful wife, Carolyn Bessette, and the heir to the Kennedy throne if he ever chose to run for office. Towards the end of his life he increasingly felt the need to get more involved in politics, as confirmed by private discussions with his colleagues about continuing the Kennedy tradition of public service. He also became aware of the powerful forces behind his father’s assassination, and felt obligated to quietly pursue the truth. Was this making him a threat? 

I have written previous books about JFK and President William McKinley, but none of these books have enjoyed the level of national impact that I had hoped. The only book that received a fair level of national media exposure was my book about the Kennedy assassination, titled Why the C.I.A. Killed JFK and Malcolm X (2014). During the research for this book, I learned about the death of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News who was likely killed by the C.I.A. Like me, Webb was also involved in exposing how the Intelligency Agency was involved in the drug trade. It scared me even further when I found out later that same year in 2014 a movie was released titled Kill the Messenger (directed by Homeland producer Michael Cuesta, starring Jeremy Renner), that chronicled Gary Webb’s research in his book Dark Alliance: The Cia, The Contras. Webb had revealed that a drug ring operating in the San Francisco Bay Area sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras, making Oliver North the fall guy during the Iran–Contra affair.

It appears likely that at the end of his life, JFK Jr. was becoming increasingly aware that the C.I.A. had organized or at least greenlighted the assassination of his father. This fact may have been why he chose to become a publisher, to have a platform to expose the truth to the world, and bring to justice for those who planned his father’s execution. Let us first explore the possibility that John F. Kennedy, Jr. was seriously considering running for governor of New York, and eventually President. This, according to his closest friends, was exactly what was on his mind in the last months of his life. His assistant at George magazine, Rose Marie Terenzio, told People in a July 2016 interview that he was eventually planning on running for President. After Republican New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato told Kennedy he should run for mayor of New York City, he apparently laughed it off. After this encounter with D’Amato, Terenzio asked why he would not want to consider it. His answer pointed to a much loftier goal, a shrewd political calculation that would have made his father proud. “Well, Rosie, how many mayors do you know that become President?” Kennedy said to Terenzio. “I was so shocked I didn’t say anything. Then he smirked as if to say ‘That’s not the road you go down.’ The mayor of a city is not a large enough platform to stage a run for the White House. However, the U.S. Senate, or being the governor of a prominent state like New York could have been just the stepping stone that he had in mind to launch his presidential bid, likely in 2004. RoseMarie Terenzio: "Someone once asked me if John were alive, what would he think of Obama being elected president, and I responded if John were alive, Barack Obama would not be the President. John would have come into the presidency by then. He was approached to run for the Senate before Hillary Clinton joined the race. Carolyn knew it was an eventuality. She was nervous about it—”That’s gonna be crazy”—but she understood it would be in her future."

The next election for governor would have been in 2002. John Kennedy Jr. would have faced George Pataki, who at that time was seeking a third term. Most people voting that year did not vote for Pataki, as he garnered an unimpressive 49% of the popular vote. He largely ran on his record of leadership during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City. The one candidate who could have counteracted this appeal would have been JFK Jr, a longtime resident of New York City. Kennedy probably would have personally known some of the people who died in the attack, and would have aided in the recovery. There is no doubt that his potential appeal as a candidate would have energized New York State Democrats. A fellow Democrat from New York, Mark Green, mulling over his own run for the Senate, conducted a private poll in 1997 to see who Democrats liked the most within their state. “He was by far the most popular Democrat,” Green said. “He had the highest favorable-unfavorable spread; 65% of Democrats rated him favorably and only 10% rated him unfavorably.” Former New York State Democratic Chairman John Marino said that if Kennedy ever ran for office, “it would have been, goodbye to anyone else.” Such a campaign would have been much like when his uncle Robert Kennedy won his New York U. S. Senate seat by an impressive 10-point margin, 53% to 43%, over incumbent Republican Kenneth Keating in 1964. Assuming Kennedy won the election in November 2002, he would have become New York’s 54th governor on January 1, 2003. Kennedy posed no political threat to Hillary Clinton in 1999 because he had decided not to run against her for the Senate nomination. Hence this fact removes the only motives the Clintons would have had to conspire to murder him. 

Journalist Lawrence Leamer confirmed Kennedy’s reluctance to go against Clinton in his book Sons of Camelot (2011). He said that if Clinton wanted to run he would not fight her, and instead turn his political ambitions elsewhere. “He was too much of a gentleman,” Leamer said. In fact, the whole concept that the Clintons were behind Kennedy’s assassination is more akin to misinformation, deliberately placed in the fringe media to distract attention from the real forces behind his assassination. It is reminiscent of theories for the JFK assassination that Fidel Castro, or the Russians, conspired to kill Kennedy, which have no real basis. Removing the Clintons as conspirators is also helpful to allow us to pin the blame on a much more likely force behind JFK Jr.’s assassination, namely the C.I.A. 

Therefore, let us try to establish that JFK Jr. was in fact researching his father’s death. The most credible source and most interesting lead was brought up by Don Jeffries, the author of Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics (2016). Jeffries pointed out that Meg Azzoni had a lot to reveal about JFK Jr.’s mindset when he interviewed her. Kennedy and Azzoni dated when they attended Phillips Academy in the late 1970s, ironically the same school that the Bush family sent their children to. It was here that the young Kennedy began to show an interest in finding out the truth behind the assassination. Was Kennedy able to obtain the attendance records of young George W. Bush for November 1963? Even later in his life, as an alumnus he probably had enough connections at the school to find out if George W. Bush was at Phillips Academy on November 22, 1963. As a Kennedy, he could have charmed his way to get those records from the administration, or obtained them covertly. Interestingly, his time at Phillips seems to correspond to the time when he began to form an obsession with who really killed his father. This was confirmed when Azzoni published a book in 2007 titled 11 Letters and a Poem: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Meg Azzoni. In it, she writes that as a teenager in the late 1970s, JFK Jr. was beginning to doubt the official version of events, and wanted to seek his own answers. “His heartfelt quest,” she wrote, “was to expose and bring to trial who killed his father, and covered it up.” Jeffries also said that he interviewed “another friend of JFK Jr.’s inner circle, who very adamantly requested to remain anonymous, and who verified that JFK Jr. was indeed quite knowledgeable about the assassination and often spoke of it in private.”

Jeffries also claimed George was set to launch an investigation into the assassination in the very near future: “Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen confirmed that he was scheduled to meet with JFK Jr. the following week to discuss joining George magazine, where his primary focus would be investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” Which brings us to the strange story of a man named True Ott. Jeffries and Azonni provide ample evidence of Kennedy’s desire to investigate the assassination of his father. The assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. should also be viewed in the prism of a lasting hatred that the C.I.A. has harbored towards the Kennedy family for decades. His death then would just be the latest example of how this agency consistently undermined the Kennedy administration and eventually eliminated JFK, RFK, and even twice targeted Edward Kennedy. For a full explanation of the C.I.A. motives for the Kennedy assassination, look no further than my book Why the C.I.A. Killed JFK and Malcolm X: The Secret Drug Trade in Laos. The rift between Kennedy and the agency began with the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The effort to depose Cuban dictator Fidel Castro completely failed. During the C.I.A.-backed invasion, the agency asked Kennedy to provide air support for the invaders, or stage a mass invasion. The president refused to do so, fearing the political fallout from attacking an unprovoked enemy, as well as a retaliatory response from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the agency felt the president could not be trusted to back their covert operations, and viewed him as soft on communism. 

Privately, the president felt the agency was deliberately trying to provoke him into starting a wider war with the Russians. Kennedy eventually fired C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles, and C.I.A. Director of Operations Richard Bissell. The agency responded by infiltrating JFK’s pet program, the Peace Corps. Agents were pretending to be college students, and then joined the Peace Corps to go overseas to promote war. To this very day, if you were ever in the C.I.A. you cannot join the Peace Corps. After this the president became so angry with the agency that he told an administration official that he was “going to shatter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces.” The following summer, the president did just that, issuing National Security Action Memorandums 55, 56, and 57. These directives shifted covert operations from the C.I.A. to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to the Department of Defense. Here is what NSAM 55 said: "I regard the Joint Chiefs of Staff as my principal military advisor responsible both for initiating advice to me and for responding to requests for advice. I expect their advice to come to me direct and unfiltered. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have a responsibility for the defense of the nation in the Cold War similar to that which they have in conventional hostilities. They should know the military and paramilitary forces and resources available to the Department of Defense, verify their readiness, report on their accuracy, and make appropriate recommendations for their expansion and improvement. I look to the Chiefs to contribute dynamic and imaginative leadership in contributing to the success of the military and paramilitary aspects of Cold War programs. Any proposed paramilitary operation in the concept state will be presented to the Strategic Resources Group for initial consideration and for approval as necessary by the President." The Chiefs would now be the “principal military advisor,” not the C.I.A., and their advice must be “direct and unfiltered,” implying that the agency had lied to him, and hid information. JFK would now be counting on the Chiefs’ leadership in “paramilitary” operations, an area that had been assigned to the agency. As I said in my book, “This World War Two veteran was seeking to reestablish the model of ‘conventional’ warfare that worked during World War Two when there was no C.I.A., and the president and the Chiefs operated in tandem. NSAM 55 was a severe blow to the power, influence, and role of the Central Intelligence Agency. So was NSAM 57, issued that same day.”  In the 1960s, Laos was one the best places to grow opium. Since the 1950s the C.I.A. had used the cover story of fighting communism in Southeast Asia to provide themselves easy access to the drug trade. The agency would use Air America planes to transport the opium and later convert it to heroin to sell to American GI’s in Vietnam. The agency and the Joint Chiefs consistently pressured the president to commit 60,000 ground troops to Southeast Asia which he resisted at every turn. A massive commitment would mean years of access to the drug trade and a susceptible customer base to sell heroin to. On July 23, 1962, a Declaration of Neutrality for Laos was signed in Geneva which ordered the C.I.A. to leave Laos. It was not long before the agency began to retaliate. On August 5, 1962, less than two weeks after the Laotian peace accords, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her apartment. Instead of following the president’s orders, the agents defied this order, and brought war back to Laos. They assassinated leaders loyal to JFK, all to get him to commit ground forces to win the civil war there. 

Richard Nixon recounted in his memoirs a revealing conversation that he had with Kennedy on April 20, 1961, one day after the Bay of Pigs Invasion failed. “I just don’t think we ought to get involved, particularly where we might find ourselves fighting millions of Chinese troops in the jungles,” Kennedy said. “In any event, I don’t see how we can make a move in Laos, which is thousands of miles away, if we don’t make a move in Cuba, which is only ninety miles away.” Kennedy felt the same way about Vietnam. The Sec Def Conference of May 1963, and another meeting of key JFK advisors in Hawaii in November 1963, both recommended a phased “De-Vietnamization” withdrawal from Vietnam by 1965. To this effect, JFK signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 on October 11, 1963, to recall the first 1,000 advisors of the 16,500 by December 1963. By November 1963 it was clear this president was not interested in any large-scale commitment to war in Southeast Asia which would spell an end to any hope for continued access to the drug trade. Not only that, there was a very good chance there was going to be four more years of JFK, considering his approval ratings, and polling done at the time against Barry Goldwater. A poll conducted in March 1963 of JFK against Goldwater had Kennedy trouncing him 67% to 27%. A second term could not be tolerated by this rogue agency. Proving the C.I.A.’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination is not even all that difficult any longer thanks to the work of many gifted historians, researchers, and investigators such as Jim Marrs, and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. 

Most importantly though are the recent revelations of longtime C.I.A. agent E. Howard Hunt. Before Hunt passed away in 2007, he offered a deathbed confession to his son John that detailed C.I.A. involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Four months after Hunt died, Rolling Stone did an article explaining nearly every detail of Hunt’s deathbed confession regarding the JFK assassination. Much of what he said had been suspected by several researchers for years. Taken from my book, Why the C.I.A. Killed JFK and Malcom X, one of the six key men Hunt identified for the plot to kill the president was C.I.A. Agent David Morales, who died in 1978 before he could be questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Like Hunt, Morales worked on the Bay Pigs Invasion fiasco, and blamed Kennedy for its failure. Another simple way to tie the agency to the John F. Kennedy assassination was provided by Jim Marrs in his book, Crossfire. The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle used to frame Lee Harvey Oswald had ammunition that could be traced back to the C.I.A. According to an F.B.I. document, the 6.5 mm ammunition found in the Texas School Book Depository was part of a batch manufactured on a U.S. government contract by Westin Cartridge Corporation of East Alton, Illinois, which is now a part of Winchester-Western Division of Olin Industries. Is it just a coincidence that on this same weekend exactly 30 years prior there was another Kennedy family party that ended in disaster? July 18, 1969, was when the C.I.A. ambushed Edward Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. Both parties were centered around the late Robert Kennedy; the 1969 party to honor RFK campaign workers, and the 1999 party to celebrate RFK’s youngest daughter getting married. We just noted above how much hatred the C.I.A. especially harbored towards “the little bastard” Robert Kennedy due to his plans to end the Vietnam War, and expose the truth of the JFK assassination. 

The C.I.A. probably planned for JFK Jr.’s body to be recovered on July 18, 1999, the 30th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, in some sadistic twist. The recovery of the wreckage was not a matter of national security, nor a military operation. Three civilians had died. Nevertheless, within hours the C.I.A. was sweeping the area with three KH-11 photographic satellites to find the bodies. In fact, the agency knew that Edward Kennedy would of course be at this wedding party for his niece in the same location as the Chappaquiddick ambush 30 years early. Perhaps the irony was just too much for them to pass up. We can go back further with this date. We noted already how July 1962 was a bad month for the C.I.A. On July 23, 1962, a Declaration of Neutrality was signed for Laos, spelling a potential end to C.I.A. access to the opium market in Laos. Exactly one week before though, on July 16, 1962, the president did something else though that may have angered the agency even more deeply, on a personal level. Late on that Monday evening, Kennedy began an affair with the ex-wife of C.I.A. agent Cord Meyer. Her name was Mary Pinchot Meyer. Michael O’Brien in his book John F. Kennedy: A Biography, briefly discusses the beginning of the affair with Meyer, who was also the sister of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee’s wife Antoinette Pinchot.

In the months preceding his death, John Kennedy Jr’s magazine ran an article about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister. The article implies that Rabin was the victim of a conspiracy, and that the lone gunman who was convicted of the crime was simply a patsy. The article in question ran in the March 1997 edition of George. It was written by the mother of the accused assassin, and specifically implicated people within the Shin Bet as being directly involved with the assassination, or suspiciously negligent in their protection of the prime minister. Therefore, the motive would be one of revenge against Kennedy, if the Shin Bet were indeed somehow involved in Kennedy’s death. If the motive was revenge, this is a motive based off human emotions that tend to be acted out soon after the wronged party feels victimized. Therefore, if they felt wronged by Kennedy, why let him live for almost two and a half more years? That does not make any sense. Also, logistically speaking, it would be difficult for this group to pull off an overseas operation, since they operate exclusively within Israel. A final point to make to argue against their involvement is what amounts to near definitive proof of the participation of the military industrial complex in the cover up of the crime scene. No doubt this article of George magazine, March 1997, was not well received within the C.I.A. 

It showed John Kennedy Jr’s willingness to support conspiracy theories, and his ability to look beyond manufactured patsies to see the truth, much like with his father’s assassination. One final point we could make is that Mossad and the C.I.A. may have wanted to kill JFK Jr. because they did the same thing to his father. There is speculation that Israeli intelligence conspired with the C.I.A. to assassinate President Kennedy in a support role. Perhaps this article was a sign that JFK Jr. knew of this potential link and might one day expose it. The theory of an Israeli link to the JFK assassination was put forward by Press TV. Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV. Dr. Barrett said Israel had a motive to kill Kennedy because the president was opposed to the regime’s nuclear weapons program which he believed could instigate a nuclear arms-race in the Middle East. Kennedy encountered tensions with former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion who wanted to develop nuclear weapons, he said. “It seems very likely that indeed the Israelis played a significant role in the assassination as discussed in the Michael Collins Piper’s book, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy,” Barrett observed. 

John Kennedy Jr. seemed to want to fly mainly for stress relief. It was reminiscent of his father’s love of sailing. Journalist Michael Daly of the New York Daily News did a profile of JFK Jr., aptly titled “Flying Truly Was His Passion” for the Sunday edition, July 18, 1999. In it, Daly discussed how being a pilot allowed him to escape the pressures of his high-profile life. “It gave him the peace he was looking for,” said Kennedy’s flight instructor Ralph Howard. “He got hounded by the paparazzis, and I think he realized this was where he could get away from everything. It was so peaceful up there for him, nobody bothered him. Many others had thrilled at the freedom of flight, but maybe no one ever needed it so much as him.” Howard also put to rest any notion that Kennedy was a reckless pilot. In fact, he was the opposite, especially when loved ones were on board. According to Daly, “On November 25, 1997, three days after the 34th anniversary of his father’s assassination, Kennedy traveled with his wife to Indiana to trade in the Buckeye plane for a two-seater. Howard and his brother Chris noted that Kennedy had become a very careful pilot, always conducting a meticulous preflight check. ‘Every nut and bolt on the airplane,’ Chris Howard remembers. ‘He was very safety oriented.’”

Daly also noted that Kennedy’s love of flying became infectious with his wife. “Chris Howard took Carolyn Bessette Kennedy up for a flight in the two-seater. She threw her arms up and shouted like she was on a roller coaster. ‘She said, ‘I see now why John likes it so much,’ Chris Howard remembers. After landing, she literally was jumping up and down with excitement. She and Kennedy ran toward each other. ‘They just hugged and kissed,’ Chris Howard says. Daly also reported how easily Kennedy got his pilot’s license. “After Kennedy headed back East, he stayed in touch with Ralph Howard by phone and E-mail. Kennedy reported that his wife was asking to go along whenever he went flying. ‘She loved it, and he loved it,’ Ralph Howard says. Kennedy himself sounded as excited as ever when he spoke of taking flight lessons in Vero Beach, Florida. He had no trouble getting the pilot’s license needed for bigger planes in May 1998. ‘John was a natural in flying,’ Ralph Howard says.” Although he obtained his pilot’s license in April 1998, Kennedy had been taking flying lessons for at least 10 years. Arthur Marx, who teaches flying at Martha’s Vineyard Airport, says he gave Kennedy lessons 10 times over that period. “He was a very good pilot,” Marx says. “He wasn’t the least bit cocky.” The NTSB report also noted that he had flown this route many times. “In the 15 months before the accident, the pilot had flown about 35 flight legs either to or from the Essex County/Teterboro, New Jersey, area and the Martha’s Vineyard/Hyannis, Massachusetts, area."

The JFK assassination and the RFK assassination both can be proven to be conspiracies using eyewitness testimony. In both cases, credible people saw more than one person shooting at the crime scene. Although there was no gun involved in the JFK Jr.'s plane crash (that we know of) we can still rely on eyewitness testimony to bring us closer to the truth. Three people heard an explosion in the sky near Martha’s Vineyard on the night of July 16, 1999. This would contradict the official version of events that the plane crashed due to pilot error. The fact that luggage (and possibly other debris) was found scattered miles away from the crash site, indicated that the cabin had been breached by an internal explosion. If eyewitness testimony could back up this claim, there would be no reasonable way to avoid concluding that a bomb brought down the Piper Saratoga. Journalist Lawrence Patterson in the July 31, 1999, edition of the journal Criminal Politics reported the following information. “A report at 3:00 p.m. Saturday, by Shepard Smith of Fox TV, named another of these witnesses of an explosion. In fact, the witness was a guest at the scheduled wedding that J.F.K Jr. and his wife were on their way to attend. The witness was also a friend of Shepard Smith, who is a producer at Fox TV.” In other references, this witness was referred to as a cousin of a producer at Fox News. 

“Several witnesses on the ground that night reported seeing and hearing an airborne explosion in the area where Kennedy’s plane went down, and these were all very credible witnesses,” said Scott Meyers who listed three witnesses to an explosion in the sky. This particular (anonymous) witness “was actually in town for Rory Kennedy’s wedding which was to take place that weekend, the very event John and Carolyn were headed for when their plane went down. These eyewitness stories were widely reported by all kinds of media outlets including United Press International, ABC News, and Fox TV.” I want to highlight how the recovery of the emergency locator beacon proved that the U.S. government was involved in this conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy Jr. The second witness in question was a reporter for the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette who was walking along the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard that night, and just happened to be looking in the right place at the right time. What is important about this witness is that he both saw and heard an explosion. Investigator Don Jeffries had this to say about this “mysterious reporter.” WCVB-TV reporter Steve Sbraccia, who covered the story, wrote in a 2006 email, “I’ve always felt there was something wrong about that crash… from the way the police swept through that beach forcing everyone off – to the way they kept the wreck site closely guarded until they pulled up every bit of debris.” Sbraccia had encountered the enigmatic reporter from the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, who claimed to have seen an explosion in the air and then seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. In another email to me, from 2012, Sbraccia reiterated, “I can swear in court that man was real – and I reported exactly what he told me he saw.” Researcher John DiNardo had attempted to track down this elusive reporter shortly after the incident, but the paper refused to even furnish his name. I encountered the same resistance, when the present editor, who claimed to have personally covered the story for the paper, informed me that she had no recollection at all of any such reporter.

As well as a follower of JFK, I was intrigued by the path his son would choose. I am sure JFK Jr. could have achieved so much more greatness had he lived. It was somehow surprising to find out JFK's son was a rather decent, loyal guy. How rare is it for someone so famous and handsome to not be a complete brat; instead, he was really an outstanding person, a man who, in spite of his wealth and good looks seemed humble and only wanted to do something to alleviate the ills of his country. As his friend John Perry Barlow recalled in 2016: "John really was a serial monogamist, in spite of the fact that it was very difficult for his girlfriends to believe it, because he was under a continuous barrage of opportunities. Most of those flings reported by the press were fake. They made a lot out of that stuff, you know. Sarah Jessica Parker and John had no relationship, not really, and he had nothing with Madonna, not really. John had a crush on Claire Danes, but he never told her. Claire wrote an essay for George in the October 1996 issue. She was 17 at the time, right around Romeo & Juliet. John had a genuine connection with Molly Ringwald in the late 80s, and he had a serious relationship with Daryl Hannah which lasted five years. But he realized Daryl had been lying to him about her priorities. "I was so enamored of Daryl for a long time, but I don't love her anymore," he said to me in 1995. I really think his wife Carolyn was his true love. John and me talked on the phone two weeks before he died. I asked him, 'Do you remember that conversation we had about being a good man?' And he said, 'Of course, I think about it a lot.' Then I said to him, 'I just want you to know that you have spectacularly achieved that objective. You are a good man, the best man I know."

My mission now was to find a male reporter who began writing for the Gazette in May or June 1999, and then stopped reporting for them in August or September 1999. It would confirm the information from John DiNardo’s interview, and it would give us solid proof that this person did exist. I would like to thank Vanessa Mitchell, librarian at the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room and Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress for making sure I was able to obtain the microfilm I was looking for. I picked up another microfilm at the The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library and viewed it at the Grosvenor Room (the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library's Special Collections department) with a second person who wishes to remain anonymous. We began looking at the Gazette in April 1999 and wrote down the names of all male reporters until the September 1999 editions. The process was tedious, but we eventually found what we were looking for. There was a male reporter who began writing for the Gazette in late May 1999, and then once September 1999 arrived, his name no longer appeared. I will not reveal the name of this man who will probably be in his early 40s by 2020. In retrospect, I suppose the Gazette editor wanted to shield this young man from scrutiny or danger. If anyone is interested in finding out his name, you are welcome to look at the microfilm yourself, and verify this through the same process. My advice though if you are going to request this film through interlibrary loan, do not bother trying to get it through any libraries in Massachusetts, go directly through the Library of Congress. 

Eyewitness Number Three: Victor Pribanic, who was also mentioned in The Day John Died (2001) by Christopher Anderson. “The lone fisherman angling for bass off Squibnocket Pond on Martha’s Vineyard looked up to see a small aircraft flying toward the Island. Victor Pribanic, a forty-five-year-old Pittsburg attorney who had been coming to the Vineyard for twenty years, thought nothing of it and went back to his fishing. Within moments there was a loud bang…” Also, Anderson mentioned that Pribanic looked out towards the Atlantic to follow the sound of the explosion. This of course is the opposite direction of Falmouth. All three witnesses heard a single bang in the Atlantic, the opposite direction of Falmouth. Squibnocket Pond is on the extreme western end of Martha’s Vineyard Island. To look at something going on in Falmouth would be impossible from there. He would have to turn around and look across the entire length of the island. Also, the editor said fireworks were going off in Falmouth. None of the witnesses heard fireworks going off. They heard a single explosion. If fireworks were going off over 30 miles away in Falmouth that is an entirely different event from what these witnesses saw and heard. This is how the New York Daily News reported Pribanic’s account in a story on July 21, 1999. “I heard an explosion over my right shoulder,” Pribanic said yesterday in the first interview he has granted since the crash that killed JFK Jr.; his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette. “It sounded like an explosion. There was no shock wave, but it was a large bang.” Pribanic, who has spent his summers on Martha’s Vineyard for 20 years, pinpointed the source of the sound about 4 miles offshore, near Nomans Island. He said that just before hearing the noise, he noticed a small aircraft flying low over the water toward the island… Pribanic said he fished until 1 a.m., pulling in one large striper before heading home to bed. When he woke up Saturday morning, he heard the initial reports that Kennedy’s plane was missing and felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He immediately phoned the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. Officials there put him in touch with West Tisbury police, who relayed his information to the National Transportation Safety Board. United Press International, ABC News and WCVB-TV fully confirmed this story. All was well and the sky was moderately clear… All of sudden as a lightning bolt, Pribanic turned abruptly towards the explosion: “I heard a loud impact like a bomb,” said Pribanic, a skilled trial lawyer from White Oak, Pennsylvania. At first, he thought it could have been the military, exploding one of their bombs off of No-Man’s Island, a small island off the shore. But that couldn’t be, since they stopped that years ago. Where Victor Pribanic had pointed as the location of the explosion is exactly where the Coast Guard recovered scattered items from the blown-up plane and near where other debris from the plane had washed ashore. I asked Mr. Pribanic, who returned my call, if he felt that JFK Jr. and his family was murdered. He said, “Yes, it’s certainly in the realm of possibility.”

For a man who was so universally loved and respected by Democrats and Republicans alike for his ability to rise above politics, JFK Jr. is still missed today in our polarized country. He might have been the kind of president to remind us about the value of service not to yourself, but to the greater good of the people. The hope and promise of President Kennedy’s call to service, efforts at racial equality, and struggles for world peace may have lived on in his son, as JFK Jr. faced the challenges of the strife-filled 21st century. JFK Jr. was 38 years-old when he died. JFK had used his brief time in the Congress in the 1950s as the beginning of his path to the White House. A brief sojourn in Albany as governor of New York beginning in 2003 could have put JFK Jr. on a similar trajectory path to the presidency in 2004. John F. Kennedy Jr. would have been 43 years-old on election day that year, the same age that his father was when he took the oath of office on January 20, 1961. JFK Jr. was unique in terms of what he represented in our culture, that's gone, it has not been replaced, and I don't think it ever will be. There was certainly motive on the part of powerful people and groups to kill John F. Kennedy Jr., due to his potential threat as a political candidate, and his investigation into the assassination of his father. The official version of this accident as put forward by the NTSB is counterintuitive. As it's been demonstrated, JFK Jr. was a skilled and careful pilot who knew how to use autopilot. The weather that night was clear. His call in to air traffic control, exactly one hour into the flight proved he was not suffering from spatial disorientation. The only conclusion any logical person would make then is that this crash was no accident. On July 16, 1999, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. was assassinated. This realization has tremendous and painful implications. If we could get to the point where a reopening into this investigation was possible, those responsible of the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. could still be held legally accountable. —"Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr. Assassination" (2018) by Professor John Koerner