WAKETH THE WATCHMAN?

Our Strangelovian Military and the JFK Assassination

Harold Weisberg

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

1.	Reordering Our System and Our Country

2.	Vietnam: "Deception, Intrigue and the Struggle for Power"

3.	Cuba and the Bay of Pigs

4.	The Cuba Missile Crisis Revisited

5.	"And We Call Ourselves Human Beings"

6.	Cui Bono?

7.	How Wild is the "Wild Blue Yonder?"

8.	How May Lives Did Lee Harvey Oswald Live? Herbert Philbrick's Three?

9.	The Navy Record Demands that It be Investigated

10.	Is There Any Limit On What the CIA Is Capable Of? Or Did?

11.	Who's Coup?

12.	An "Irreversible Chain of Events" and "the Zone of Lunacy"

13.	"The Politics of Lying" and "the Press Box Mentality"

14.	Killing The Truth

Conclusions: Waketh the Watchman?

Bibliography

PREFACE

It is not age that has slowed me down and limited what I can do. It is what comes with age, health reverses. When I wrote this book in great haste I was 81. I had survived serious medical problems that began in 1976 with the first of a series of thromboses in both veins and arteries. Thereafter I survived six operations, one to an eye, the other internal. My doctors did not expect me to survive two of those operations, one arterial, the other to the heart. I began this book after learning that I have no functioning artery in either leg. There is much I am not physically able to do, much that in this book I would have liked to do, liked to be able to include in it that it was not possible for me to do. As with much in our lives and our work, there is what just is not possible and there is nothing at all we can do about that.

Because of these limitations I was severely limited in what I could draw upon. I was in fact limited to what was at hand, readily accessible.

While these limitations did not make it impossible for me to assemble a case of motive, means and opportunity in the JFK assassination, the lawyers' way of using circumstantial evidence and how they refer to it, they did limit what I could use to make a more detailed case. However, the case I have put together is, I believe, a substantial one and more than merits -- one that requires serious consideration by us all, by the media in particular.

While the media had nothing to do with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it had everything to do with the acceptance of the official Report on that assassination. It had everything to do with its refusal to adequately report on exposures of what is so very wrong in that official "solution," which it is not at all, not in any sense.

Except as "official" truth, which is not truth.

With all the questions about that assassination virtually from the moment those shots were fired in Dealey Plaza in the heart of Dallas, Texas, Friday, November 22, 1963, the media has steadfastly refused to make any real inquiry into it. Making this kind of inquiry is, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in a memorable case, The Pentagon Papers case, in which the media, at great personal risk, glorified itself, is meeting its Constitutional duties.

The media did superbly in the case of The Pentagon Papers. It had to to defend itself.

It disgraced itself and all of us in its abdications and failures when the President was assassinated and ever since then. In its failure to "fulfill", Black's words again, its obligations, under the Constitution, in return for which the Constitution grants it rare and unprecedented rights and freedoms, it made it possible for the government to foist off on the people a fraud of a non-solution. Its failure to inquiry means that what could be done to try to learn who and what were behind that assassination fell to individuals who lacked power, authority and means. A few made real efforts and did bring fact to light. More imagined themselves Sherlock Holmes returned and in their fantasies compounded the failure of the media and confused the people even more. The more persuasive they were -- and when they were making it up they could make it both attractive and persuasive -- the more the people were confused, misled and misinformed. That, in turn reduced the pressure that could be brought to bear on the government to belatedly be honest with the people, as it has never been about this matter of the assassination and its official investigations. If those who refer to themselves as "researchers" and their books, articles and newsletters are regarded as the minor media, then both the major and the minor media failed us at the time of that assassination and ever since then.

When all the official failures are added to this, the grim fact is that all our basic institutions failed and continue to fail, including the most minor of the minor media.

From these failures we face, as did other peoples whose institutions failed them, the possibility of basic changes in our society and the dangers, including to freedoms, that resulted, as recent history teaches with such unprecedented pain and suffering.

But that all our institutions failed and as a result, particularly of media and government failure, that we do not know the truth does not mean we must not try to learn and establish the truth that can be established to the degree now possible.

I began making that effort when I wrote the first book on the Warren Commission and its Report. Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, was completed in mid-February, 1965. It was published in a limited edition that August. When after more than 100 rejections internationally for it I became a publisher and published it in May, 1966, that was the first time the people had access in book form to any comprehensive examination and criticism of the official "solution." I refer to it as, in Orwell's words, "the official mythology." This is my eleventh book on our assassinations, of which eight have been published.

In continuing my inquiry and other work after I published my first book I ransacked the Commission's files at the National Archives until impediments placed in my way quite improperly in official reaction to my first book wasted too much time for me. Of the other means I was able to use most valuable of them was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It was enacted in 1966, to become effective, the law of the land, on July 4, 1967. With that date selected it was a fine peg on which President Lyndon B. Johnson and others in political life could hang their Fourth of July speeches extolling and reveling in it. What was in their speeches was fine, but by their practice, Johnson and others in his administration and in all of those who followed them, restricted the law by all the means available to them. This included getting it rewritten before compliant judges who can always be selected by any government as it picks and chooses the cases to force to trial when it expects support in this from the judges assigned to those cases.

I filed more than a dozen such lawsuits. Some were precedental. One led to the 1974 amending of the investigatory file exemption of that act under which most of the unjustified denials of information were made possible. After it was amended, over official mendacity in one of my earliest cases, I was able to obtain about a third of a million pages of once-withheld records. Most of them are from the FBI. About a quarter of a million of these pages relate to the assassination of President Kennedy and its investigations.

Because I believe that FOIA bespeaks the most American belief, of the people's right to know what their government does, and because I believe that the Act makes those of us who use it surrogates for the people, I have always made the records I obtained under it freely available to all writing in the field -- even though I know that most of them will write what I do not agree with. This practice, too, I believe is basic American doctrine, that anyone has a right to say and believe whatever he or she may want, and that the people should have access to all views, beliefs and interpretations.

Once I acquired all this information, I wanted it to be permanently available. I have therefore deeded it to Hood College, a fine small college here in Frederick, Maryland, where I live. Some assassination information is already on deposit there and available for scholarly uses.

The older I get, the more I lived through and could observe, the more it became apparent that the most basic changes are taking place in our country, changes that depart from the basic principles of those who established it at great personal risk. To our Founding Fathers these principles and beliefs were fundamental. They earned respect for our country and its system and made it viable.

I am old-fashioned. I still hew to these beliefs and principles. I believe that departures from them have damaged us severely. Consistent with these old-fashioned beliefs I believe the only means of addressing these departures from our founding beliefs is, however slight the odds of success at any time, by informing the people. This is why people write books, why I have written my books.

I began writing in high school. After my friend who was the school paper's editor got into scholastic difficulties and was banned from all extra-curricular activities, I edited the paper. In my junior year, it earned my school the Columbia School of Journalism "All-American Honor" award.

That is the same school of journalism that decides upon and awards the highest American honors in writing, the Pulitzer prizes. It is also the same school of journalism that did not respond to my letter informing it that its history panel had selected for the 1993 history book Pulitzer the most deliberately, calculatedly dishonest book on the assassination of President Kennedy. My letter was not answered. That book was Gerald Posner's mis-titled Case Closed. This failure even to acknowledge my caution to it of the spectacular disgrace it almost brought upon itself is not consistent with the standards of American journalism it is supposed to teach. This also represents what I regard as a major change in our lives and standards.

In editing this school weekly paper I was entirely without supervision. I did most of the editing at the printing plant. For that year there was a not a single complaint about the paper. But that and the honor I earned for the school did not lead to my being named to replace the graduating editor. I was also next in line as managing editor. I then began to learn about genteel, unseen, and unspoken, anti-Semitism, about prejudice.

I became a reporter for the state's only morning paper, the Morning News, and for its only Sunday paper, the Star. On the News I learned that often news is what the editors believe the owner wants in his paper and that what is not news is what he does not want in it.

Pierre du Pont, then the most powerful man in that dynasty, owned the News. He was also a strong supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign to repeal the amendment to the Constitution that prohibited even the possession of any beverages that contained any alcohol. It was known as the Volstead Act. After "repeal," as it was called, I wrote what I thought was an innocent feature about women switching from tea to wine when in downtown shopping. In most cities of the size of Wilmington most shopping in those days was downtown. In returning the story to me and seeing how crestfallen I was, Carl Wise, the city editor suggested that I take it to the editor of the Sunday feature section of what then was a fine newspaper, the Philadelphia Ledger. It syndicated its Sunday feature section. It was more or less the forerunner of Parade. That made me a syndicated feature writer before I was old enough to cast my first vote.

Of the features I wrote for the Ledger and the other papers it served, one forecast the Japanese aggression of a decade later. I later published that same prediction less than three months before Pearl Harbor. I was then the Washington correspondent of what then was the third largest picture magazine, Click. Only the also defunct Life and Look magazines had larger circulation among those kinds of magazines.

For Click I was also its investigative reporter. I investigated and wrote a series of exposés of Nazi cartels, their danger to this country and to its preparing for the war that had already begun in Europe.

In time Click's owner felt pressure from a then powerful organization, American First, over those stories. American First was made up of wealthy reactionaries who opposed FDR and who believed we would be able to stay out of the European war that ultimately came to us. That ended my cartel investigations. I was left with an unwritten story I had developed. Even the then most liberal paper in the country, Ralph Ingersoll's PM, did not publish it.

Standard Oil had entered into a cartel arrangement with the Nazis who owned the patents to synthetic oil and synthetic gas. Under that agreement, those patents would not be used in the United States. British Imperial Chemical Industries was, as I recall, the British partner in that cartel. I gave all my proofs, which included photostats of quite a few patent assignments, to the British intelligence agents with whom I then worked at the suggestion of the Department of Justice. But I never heard of any public use of that information in England, either. And it was at war.

Technically I was in violation of a federal law because I was not registered as the British agent I was as, but then it was the same Department of Justice that suggested that I help those British economic warfare agents that enforced that law.

I learned more and more about why what is and is not news and about what makes it that way.

Even a war for survival, which Britain then was in and we were soon thereafter, made no different at all when there were sacred cows to protect.

Before that magazine work I was an investigator for and then the editor of a committee of the United States Senate in those days before World War II broke out. It was known as The Senate Civil Liberties Committee. When our investigations included some of the country's major corporations the attitude of the press in those days before TV and when radio was in its infancy changed. The news stories were more critical of the committee and reported less of what its uncontradicted testimony said and meant about some of the largest corporations and their violence against their employees.

What we exposed was a painful view of some of what was going on in the country and was little known. It was not what we were taught in school this country was about.

During those years in the late 1930s I was borrowed from the committee by the Department of Justice to assist it in a famous prosecution of that era, of some in "Bloody Harlan" as that remote county in southeastern Kentucky was known. Those months were not only educational in terms of the testimony at that trial in federal district court. It was a real education in successful crookedness and how those of the means and disposition can sometimes control juries in sensational cases -- literally get away with murder.

The Harlan County coal operators association and their deputized gun thugs were under indictment. The Department lawyers and the FBI agents assigned to the case did not mix with local people. I did. Some became and for years remained friends. One of them was the clerk of the federal court, Mike Pennington.

Small as Harlan County was it was of political importance in state elections. Harlan elections were for all practical purposes controlled by the Harlan County coal association. Its backward members were wealthy but not of the 20th century. They were able to afford and engaged influential counsel. Counsel who understood Kentucky and life in hinterland Kentucky in those days.

During the trial, early one morning, before retiring, after laying aside my Senate work I had with me, I went for a walk. Mike Pennington came up to me. I was surprised at that after midnight encounter so I knew he had to be watching for me. As we walked he told me that the sequestered jury had been fixed, how and my whom it had been done and how he came to knew about it.

The trial was not in Harlan Country, it was in Laurel County, seat of the federal district court, in the town of London, a small town of 1910 people. The coal operators had investigated the jurors through the county property records and learned which of the jurors owned their own homes. They then investigated and learned the details of the mortgages on those homes. Then they bought those mortgages up. And next they saw to it that the wives of the jurors who in those days did not include women learned about it. So, when the sequestered jurors were permitted visits from their wives, all under the eyes of the federal marshals guarding the jury, the property-owners among the jurors learned that they would be sitting in judgement on those who owned the mortgages on their homes and could arrange for them to lose their homes.

These jurors talked about it among themselves. They decided to tell the United States marshals.

Then the marshals discussed what to do. They did not trust the FBI. That was the first but not the last time I heard that the marshals often did not trust the FBI. In this case, their mistrust had nothing to do with the detail of FBI agents assigned to that case. They were a fine and a very competent crew with whom I had friendly relations. The marshals decided to tell Mike, the clerk of the court.

Mike also did not trust the FBI. I do not now recall whether he lacked trust in the Department lawyers who were then under the Assistant Attorney General in charge of its Criminal Division, Brien McMahon, or whether Mike felt uncomfortable telling such a story to a man he really did not know. So, he laid it on me because he did trust me and I was part of the federal party.

I, of course, told McMahon immediately. He refused to believe it!

He did not check. He did not send his able FBI agents out to check. He just refused to believe it.

So, I returned to my Senate work in Washington during the middle of that trial.

The sequestered and closely guarded jury had been fixed, it hung and some 30 thugs and those who paid for their murders and other thuggery were acquitted. They were forever immune for many murders. In that small county of 50,000 people, in a time of relative peace and tranquility in the rest of the country, the annual murders in Harlan exceeded all the murders in all of New York State, then the most populace state, year after year.

It can't happen here? It did!

In World War II as a soldier I wound up in the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. I was not a spook. I was a writer and an analyst who also did some special investigating and trouble-shooting on a few delicate jobs where others had not succeeded.

With what those and other professional experience indicate, I began my work on the JFK assassination with a background and experiences others working in the field did not have. As learning experience for what is not taught I go into my background with more details in the early part of Inside the JFK Assassination Industry, a long book manuscript I completed before beginning to write this book. To these learning experiences I add the costly learning about how easy it can be to steal the work of another and not do anything illegal in doing it. Two successful movies of that era, when domestic morale was important, were stolen from my work and there was nothing I could do about it.

Before enlisting in the Army I developed a story about an authentic Navy hero who was eased out of the service because the Navy refused to believe him, because he was regarded as a radical and because it did not like what he reported. In the late 1920s or early 1930s, Marine Colonel Evans Fordyce Carlson was our Naval Attache to the Chiang Kai Shek government in China after it defeated the Communists. The Communists had retreated deep inland and were living largely in caves. In fighting the Japanese invaders, they developed new concepts and means of waging war for those of less power. Carlson heard of them, went and lived with them, and observed and learned their new methods and techniques. He had a problem getting his intelligence back to the embassy because the Chiang government, authoritarian, opened the mails. So among those Carlson used as subagents to whom he could safely get his intelligence was an Associated Press reporter who 40 years later became my good friend, James D. White. Jim took Carlson's intelligence to our embassy. Jim told me about this when I was telling him about my Carlson story from Navy files. That is the story that made "Gung Ho!", the slogan of that Red army, a word in the English language.

The magazine to which I sold that story offered it to the Reader's Digest. For some reason I did not know, the Digest, while wanting that story very much, did not want it from that magazine. It offered the magazine a generous sum for it and for me for the story. The magazine refused to accept the offer. So, all in my story coming from the public domain, the Digest had another writer duplicate my story. It was that writer who got the much larger payment for it when Hollywood bought it for what became the movie based on it, meaning my work, the movie that was titled "Gung Ho!"

My last writing job in OSS before I was switched to analysis with a few side investigations was to do The History of OSS Secret Operations. The next thing I knew about that work was when Jimmy Cagney starred in the movie based on it, OSS.

Among the things I learned before I began my assassination work is that Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Purloined Letter, is an accurate observation of life's realities. People do miss the obvious. I've tried not to.

Robert Louis Stevenson had it straight in Alice in Wonderland, with its magic mirror in which up was down. And too many people have not learned the practical wisdom of William of Occam, the early British philosopher who advised, my words not his, keep it simple. Too many people complicate things where there is no need to. I've tried to avoid that, complicated as the official evidence I use in my books may appear to be.

As one result, almost 30 years after my first book appeared I have not received a single letter or phone call from any of the hundreds of whom I wrote critically complaining of any unfairness or inaccuracy.

I hope that in this book I have found what was out in the open, as those seeking the letter in Poe's story did not; that I do not have the reader looking into any magic mirrors; and that I have succeeded in keeping it all simple enough to be readily understood.

Most of what I use in this book was in my library, research I began when in 1965 I planned a book with the working title Tiger To Ride: The Untold Story of the Cuba Missile Crisis. All of what I use was out in the open, like the letter in Poe's story. There is nothing at all secret in this book. Right out in the open yet unseen.

In it I depart from the kind of writing in my earlier books in several ways. In them I restricted myself almost entirely to official evidence. What I use in this book was almost all published. In this book I also carry forward new information that is in my lengthy book, NEVER AGAIN!. Its publication continues to be stalled by the publisher who contracted it after it was written but who had expressed interest in it when I began it in the middle of 1992. By normal publishing practices and schedules, it could easily have appeared by July, 1993. When I inquired I was promised it would be published but not until September, 1994. As a practical matter there was nothing I could do about it. Nor was there when it was not published that September. I then was promised publication in March, 1995, but that publication has not been announced by the publisher who did announce other publications for that month before I began to write this book. In effect, the publisher is suppressing a major new work on the Kennedy assassination and its investigations, a book that draws together parts of what I published earlier to give them new meaning along with entirely new information.

In that book I have a chapter titled "Was There a Military Conspiracy?" In this book, without repeating what is in that one, I carry that forward. As a question, not as a solution. With the crime itself never officially investigated and never intended to be, the documentation of which is what I begin NEVER AGAIN! with, there are no leads from any official source that private persons can use as a basis for their private investigations to solve the crime. This is to say that no definitive statement of who the assassins were can be made responsibly. This book neither intends nor intends to make any such a definitive statement.

Rather does it, using the lawyers' approach of addressing circumstantial evidence by assessing motive, means and opportunity, make a circumstantial case for believing that the assassination involved the military.

In fairness to the millions in the military, it should be understood that in referring to the military in this book I refer only to those few at the top who control it.

This book assumes there was a conspiracy without offering proof of it because that proof is overwhelmingly in my earlier books and its remains unrefuted. The official mythology is that there was no conspiracy. The official evidence is that without possibility of question, there was a conspiracy, a very successful conspiracy.

The government merely lied to us. As those readers not already aware of it will see, lying has long been government policy, a policy greatly expanded since John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The "official truth" of this official lying includes almost everything the government told us about the fact of that assassination and its conclusions.

The record I have assembled herein, I emphasize the entirely public record, will have to speak for itself for now. If and when this book is read by others, and I have no publishing arrangements for it as I write this and expect none, each will be able to decide for himself whether the case is reasonable and possible.

That this case, whatever its merit, was not assembled earlier is the direct responsibility of the failed media. In our society it had that responsibility and it did not meet or intend to try to meet that responsibility. Thus the task falls to an aged, ailing, and frail man. I could no longer, for one example, continue with the FOIA lawsuits I used to rescue withheld official information from its official oblivion, and it was more than a decade thereafter before Congress passed another law to require its disclosure. FOIA did require the disclosure of what had not been disclosed but when the government itself was the prosecutor and the courts were compliant, the government merely flaunted the law.

In partial response to the new law enacted in 1992, the CIA began disclosing records I had requested of it under FOIA beginning after the 1974 amending of the Act's investigatory files exemption. The legislative history discloses that amending was over government abuses in one of my earliest cases. The CIA merely ignored the law and then got away with it. It's FOIA record was by far the worst and the most sophisticatedly dishonest within my experiences but then it had more extensive experiences in this kind of dirty works than any other agency.

If the media had met its Constitutional responsibilities there would not now be the existing tormenting questions about the assassination and there would not now be the confusion that exists among the people about the assassination and its investigations.

When the media fails the people do not and cannot know what they must know for democratic society to be able to function as our Founding Fathers intended.

But the media is not alone among our institutions that, as I say in this book and is clear in all my earlier works, failed to meet their Constitutional responsibilities when the President was assassinated and ever since then. All our institutions failed and continue to fail. And that is a great danger to our society, to its form, to our freedom.

In Robert Frost's words, altered slightly without changing their meaning, we all have promises to keep in the miles we go before we sleep. My work on our assassinations is my effort to keep that promise.

My central objectives and my ability to meet them in this work perforce changed with the advent of all the medical problems I have been fortunate in surviving as long as I have. This work would not have been possible without the great and little-recognized labors of my wife, from their first publication through all those FOIA lawsuits. After my heart operation in December, 1989, I decided that the best use I could make of the time that remains for me is to try to perfect the record for history to the degree that is possible for me. I do have knowledge others do not have and experiences other have not had that enable me to do what others in this field have not done. As the Department of Justice itself told the court in the first case filed under the Act after its 1974 amending, I then knew more about the JFK assassination and its investigations than anyone working for the FBI. (That was in Action (C.A.) 75-226, in federal district court in Washington D.C.)

This book is the most recent of those efforts to use this knowledge to try to meet Frost's promises. I do not know how long I will be able to continue with these efforts, but as long as it is possible they will continue.

And there will be a record in them for history, whether or not published in my lifetime.

FOREWORD

Richard Gallen, a friend of 25 years and a very good and helpful friend, visited me over the Fourth of July weekend in 1992. Richard is a New York publishing lawyer and occasionally a publisher. We'd met when a small publishing house in which he was one of two partners published my book, Oswald in New Orleans, in 1967. When their regular distributor, a major publisher then and now, refused to handle any book critical of the government in the JFK assassination there were very few places that book was on sale. As we had a leisurely breakfast at the Red Horse Inn here in Frederick, Maryland, we chatted about many things. He asked me about what I was doing and what I planned. At one point he smiled as he told me, "You are the most conservative man I've ever known."

"That surprises me very much," I told him. "Would you please explain it?"

I did not recall ever having had any political discussion with Richard.

"What you say," he replied, again smiling, "may seem to be extreme when you say it but it always turns out that you understated it."

That was a fine compliment from a man of means, connections, associations and friendship with many people, some of whom are prominent and influential.

"In answer to your question, what am I doing and what do I plan," I told him, "At 79, with all the many medical problems I have and having survived six operations two of which I was not expected to survive. I'm spending the rest of the time I have perfecting the record for history of the JFK assassination and its investigations."

The first of those surgeries the surgeons did not think my heart could take was the second emergency operation after I was given an artificial artery in my left thigh. That was in 1981. The second was a heart operation of 1989.

And then I told him about a book I was just beginning, the book that when I completed the rough draft that December I titled NEVER AGAIN!

"I could be interested in that," Richard told me.

"Fine. I'll send it to you when I get it retyped," I said and six months later did.

I'd had a problem in my writing that came from the complications following a left femoral artery bypass. I was less and less able to use my legs and using stairs had become increasingly difficult and hazardous.

As Richard knew, I'd filed a dozen or so lawsuits against the government, mostly against the FBI, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and as a result have about a third of a million pages of once-withheld government records. Of them about a quarter of a million relate to the JFK assassination and its official investigations. The remainder relate to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Before these handicaps prevented my continuing with those FOIA lawsuits, several of which were stonewalled by the government for a decade or a little more, they had set several precedents, including in copyright law, and one had led to the 1974 amending of FOIA to make FBI, CIA and similar agency records accessible under it.

What the media did not report is that it was the assassinated President's sole surviving brother, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy who saw to it that the legislative history of the Act's investigatory files exemption's amending would be specific and clear on this. (Congressional Record, May 30, 1974, page S 9336)

The first suit filed under the amended act, filed by my friend and pro bono lawyer Jim Lesar, was Civil Action (CA) 76-226. And it was over the earlier version of that lawsuit, because of the FBI's mendacity and corruption in it, that the investigatory files exemption was amended. At one point in CA 75-226, when I'd stated under oath that an FBI Laboratory agent, John Kilty, has perjured himself to deny me records that were not within any exemption, the Department of Justice, of which the FBI is part and which represented the government in lawsuits against it, came up with the most original and entirely irrelevant defense of the felony of perjury. It told Federal District Judge for the District of Columbia John Pratt of me that I "could make such claims ad infinitum since he is perhaps more familiar with events surrounding the investigation of President Kennedy's assassination than anyone now working for the F.B.I."

In the unreal world of FOIA litigation Judge Pratt accepted that as a complete and satisfactory explanation of the serious official felony of perjury: I knew more about the JFK assassination and its investigations than anyone at the FBI, so the FBI as a result was justified in and immune in lying to the court under oath as a result.

Testimony in the courts is to be of first-person knowledge and one is not to attest to what he does not know or knows is false. If the false swearing is material in the litigation, then it is the felony of perjury. What anyone else does or does not know is not in any way relevant.

So to speak I'd put my head on the block by stating the allegation against Kilty under oath myself rather than have my lawyer allege it. If I lied that made me subject to punishment for perjury. Thereafter in an continuing and unsuccessful effort to force some court to take notice of endless FBI perjury in my lawsuits I repeated the same charge against other FBI agents. I was never alleged to have been a perjurer myself and nothing even happened to that stable of FBI felons who to a degree did succeed in frustrating compliance and in undermining the law. The Department of Justice, which was the government's defense counsel in those lawsuits, is also the prosecutor, and I was daring the prosecutor to charge me. Not that I was not confident that would not happen. I did not swear to what I did not know and proved.

Each and every judge to whom I testified that the FBI had perjured itself before him, all well aware of the FBI's power and its disposition to leak the prejudicial information it had gathered on so many of us, including important people, just refused to do anything about it. Pratt actually threatened Jim Lesar and me. We embarrassed him.

Despite all this successful stonewalling and violation of the law of the land by those who are sworn to uphold the laws I did get all those once-withheld records. The only space we had for them in our home was in the full basement we are fortunate it has. Aside from innumerable boxes, those records take up more than 40 full-sized, four-drawer file cabinets each of which can hold two feet of records.

But as I aged and grew weaker after that successful heart operation and with the prior post-operative complication limiting the time I can safely stand still -- and I'm under a medical injunction not to stand still at all -- using the files and stairs to and from them became close to impossible and increasingly dangerous to me. I have been kept alive since my first thrombosis in 1975 by an anticoagulant. That makes me a bleeder and slow healer. Even a slight bump can be serious, a fall more serious. So, with this unprecedented riches in research I am denied access to it unless I can get someone else to fetch the records from them and then refile them.

(All these records and my own work product -- all my wife and I have -- will go to Hood College, here in Frederick. It is an excellent small college, where those records will forever be a free public archive.)

But despite this, as I explained to Richard, I'd found a way to continue writing and make a record for our history.

The Journal of the American Medical Association, known as JAMA, had begun a series of articles defending the official account of the assassination of the President and of the autopsy pathologists. JAMA's editor Dr. George Lundberg and his hired-gun staff writer Dennis Brio, both later attested that they were subject-matter ignoramuses. Lundberg was himself a former military pathologist and a friend of the chief autopsy pathologist, then Commander James J. Humes, just decided that whatever Humes and his associates said was true and nothing else mattered. Literally. (The autopsy was at the Bethesda, Maryland Navy hospital.)

So on this exotic concept of fact and science the majestic American Medical Association became a propagandist on behalf of errant government and set out to vindicate the government and Humes and his assistants, Commander J. Thornton Boswell and Army Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck.

JAMA also launched a successful promotion for that series. The media just loved it.

Because I'd made a long and detailed study of that autopsy and what relates to it exposing JAMA, Lundberg at al did not require extensive access to my files in the basement. I was the first to expose that outrage of any autopsy unworthy of a Bowery bum, leave alone of the President of the United States. I first did that in my 1965 book, Whitewash: The Report in the Warren Report. I carried this much further in my 1975 Post Mortem. Without a word of complaint from Humes, Boswell or Finck, to each of whom I sent a copy of my first book solicitating comment, or from anyone speaking for any of them.

The first of my four books on the Whitewash series was the first book on the Warren Commission, the august body appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate and report on that assassination. Despite the fact that it was the first such book and the importance to the nation and to the world of that assassination, without my getting a single adverse editorial comment, that first book on the subject got more than 100 international rejections. So, I became the country's smallest publisher to publish it myself.

Publisher and media attitudes have changed little since then.

I had not found a literary agent willing to represent a book on the subject so I had no agent. Sure, they'll gladly represent trash or faulty books because publishers have little fear of them, so agents don't either. The hogslop can be published because they create no publisher fear of the government and what it can do when the books do not hurt the government and when the flood of trash and worse confuses the people even more without any harm to the government.

So, in telling Richard that I am spending my remaining days writing about the subject to make a record for history, I knew that the record I made might never be published, that it might exist in college and university archives only. When he said he could be interested I was more than pleased. I was excited. With the disgraceful concept with which Lundberg and JAMA began and with what amounted to Brio's literary whoring with the subject about which he knew nothing and was content to repeat unquestioningly what Humes and Boswell and then Finck said, meaning in self-defense over what can neither be defended nor excused, I was confident about what I would produce.

"If you like it," I told Richard, "I want very much for it to appear while I am still alive." He nodded his head. I then explained that it was certain to be criticized and I want to be able to face those who would have to criticize it, to show that it is accurate and they would not be.

As I did with all my writing, I sent xeroxes of the drafts to two history professor friends, Dr. David Wrone, of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, and Dr. Gerald McKnight, at local Hood College, for comment and suggestions. In the field in which peer reviews are rare, otherwise most of the books could not be published, I got the best of possible peer reviews as I wrote. Wrone and McKnight are subject-matter experts.

What I did not know until he sent me the first several chapters neatly retyped is that David Wrone was so impressed with what he read that he was retyping it on his computer. How he did it will all his own work and interests and carrying a full teaching load I do not know but before the Christmas holidays he had sent retyped copies of all but the last couple of chapters to Gallen. Over the holidays he finished it up. Gallen had all the book of about a quarter of a million words early in January, 1993.

A number of friends who are well-informed on the subject also read and were quite impressed by the book. Everybody liked the rough draft. But for reasons I've not been given Gallen decided to delay it without telling me. When I began to press him on it he promised that it would be published in September, 1994! It wasn't. As I write this it is promised for March, 1995. Indications are that promise will not be kept, either. And this for a very topical book on a hot subject that could easily have been edited and published before the middle of 1993.

And if it had been there could have been standard for reviewers and reporters to judge that flagrant publisher prostitution of our history for the 30th anniversary of that tragic assassination. The sewer literary sewers overflowed with commercializations and exploitations of that anniversary. I know of not a single good book that then got published. This extended to the reprintings of earlier books for the expected market. Only bad books on our assassinations do not face difficulty getting published.

Bad as they all were, by far the worst and also the most publicized was the knowingly mistitled Case Closed by Gerald Posner. Random House made a big thing of it. U.S. News and World Report devoted much of an issue to it, including its cover. And TV could not get enough of Posner for their subject-matter ignoramuses to go into ecstacies about him and his book, the newest of the works in support of what I have always referred to as the official mythology.

I was then writing, when I could find the time, Inside the JFK Assassination Industry. At first I thought I'd just add Posner's knowingly and deliberately dishonest work to exploit, as he himself in a moment of aberrational honesty confessed, the market he believed was created for the other side of the controversy by Oliver Stone's movie JFK. Before long I decided that a couple of chapters in Inside the JFK Assassination Industry would be an entirely inadequate record for our history. By the time I was finished about 75 to 80 percent of which ultimately appeared as Case Open I had written about 200,000 words.

The month after Posner's commercialization and exploitation appeared I had made a good start in my book. I wrote Gallen briefly telling him what I was doing. By then NEVER AGAIN! had been edited and the last I'd heard was being sent to the copy editor. Gallen's response was that he and Herman Graf, of Carroll & Graf, whose counsel Gallen is, wanted to publish the book. I agreed.

What appeared is about 75-80 percent of what I wrote. The rest was just cut out. There was no editing. Typographical errors were not corrected even after I corrected them. There was no table of contents. All signs were that it was decided to do the book as cheaply as possible and by making it smaller be able to sell it for less, both with profit only in mind. Despite these handicaps and no advertising or promotion, which is the means by which readers learn about books and book sellers decide what to stock and what not to have on their shelves, my mail on it was more than merely gratifying. Within the first two months I had several hundred of the most complimentary letters I've ever gotten and that for a book that was really butchered in being published.

In describing Posner I used his publisher's unabridged dictionary to refer to him as a shyster and as a plagiarist, which is a literary thief, I'd said he had trouble telling the truth even by accident, and that those who sell their bodies are more moral and ethical. I have not had a word of complaint or protest from Posner, his publisher or anyone speaking for either.

For the paperback reprint of his shameful and shameless dishonesty all he could say of me is that for Case Open I "found" my "first publisher." In this Posner proved all over again what I said about him in Case Open, that he has trouble telling the truth even by accident. It was in fact my fifth original commercial publication and it was my thirteenth include reprints.

Poser was, unusual for him, truthful in describing Case Open as "a broadside attack" on his book. It is that and more. But honesty being strange to him he followed this saying that is was my "attempt" to "diminish the impact of" his "work."

Attempt hell! His inability to utter a word in his own defense or in defense of his book is his confession that he could not make a legitimate protest or complaint of any kind about my exposure of his knowingly, deliberately dishonest commercialization and exploitation of a subject no decent writer would defame and prostitute as he did.

U.S. News made itself into an uptown edition of the supermarket tabloids in devoting so much of an issue, including its cover, to so obviously wretchedly bad a book, a book that cannot survive any critical analysis when compared with the official established fact, a book that could not have had any of the once traditional peer reviews for supposedly serious works of non-fiction.

Lundberg converted the JAMA he edits in to a propaganda organ rather than a serious publication with the function of correctly and accurately informing the nation's physicians in particular. If there is only one publication in the entire country that should have examined the autopsy performed on the assassinated President with care and competence, that one publication is JAMA. It never did. Instead it devoted enormous space and attention to Lundberg's old-boy network defense of those whose work cannot and does not survive any comparison of it with the accepted and well-known standards of forensic medicine, which it did not even try to meet.

Neither represents the proper role of the major media in a society like ours, a society that because of the changes in -- the failures of -- the major media no longer has an informed electorate. Except on crime, sex and other matters that are not the vital issues in a democratic society, the kind of society that can function as originally intended only with an electorate informed on the major issues of the day. As this book also illustrates in reporting what it did not.

More than any other component, although no major-media component any longer functions as it should, TV is responsible. It has become a medium of distraction and entertainment even in what is supposed to be news. Thus nobody in TV, as is true of all other media components, did anything to check out either the Lundberg propaganda or the Posner commercialization and exploitation, and TV puffed both up enormously.

When Case Open was available and Posner and Random House were publicly silent about its exposure of their deliberate, intended dishonesty about so important a national issue, there was no mention of Case Open and what it reported about the commercialization and exploitation of that national tragedy. Had the media reported what the book says it would also have reported that it had gulled itself and had misled and misinformed those who trust it and depend on it for what they can know and believe.

These failures were also on Dave Wrone's mind when he visited in June, 1994, while he was here when I got a letter from Gallen seeking to explain the delay in NEVER AGAIN! I showed it to him. When he returned home Dave wrote Gallen chiding him for the delay. He referring to what had happened to Case Open. His reaction to reading the rough draft was that "aside from its marvelous and critical historical importance -- I am a historian and speak as one -- that with normal editing and formatting . . . . it was worthy of being submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in history. [I am not alone in this assessment.]"

Before then, with the delay in publishing NEVER AGAIN! I had written what I captioned as an "Afterword" for it, coming from previously suppressed official records that were disclosed pursuant to the 1992 law supposedly requiring the disclosure of all government JFK assassination records. Of this Afterword Dave wrote it "is the finest writing on the subject anywhere. It is of exceptional quality and profound perspective. Professor McKnight of Hood College shares my opinion and uses it as required reading in his course . . . ."

But nothing made a difference and NEVER AGAIN! remained for all practical purposes suppressed.

As I continued writing to make a record of our history I wrote several lengthy articles. One is titled "Senator Russell Dissents." Georgia's conservative Democrat Senator Richard Russell was a Member of the Warren Commission. He did not agree with its single-bullet theory that is the basis if its Report. Kentucky's Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper, also a Commission member, agreed with Russell. When I heard that Russell was firm in his disagreement and was checking that out in the Commission's records at The National Archives I discovered that the executive session Russell had forced to make his own record for history was without the required stenographic transcript on which at the outset the Commission had agreed it would have and keep of all its sessions. One had been phonied up to look like a verbatim transcript but it was not that at all. When I gave that to Russell he asked me to get, a letter from the Archivist stating that this phony was the only record. When I gave that letter to Russell he broke his long friendship with Lyndon Johnson. He never spoke to Johnson again. And he encouraged my work until his dying day. At the Richard Russell archive at the University of Georgia at Athens the high opinion he had of my work is recorded. I have copies of those records along with records of his and Cooper's firm and resolute disagreement with that single-bullet theory, the basis of its Report.

Then I decided to write this book. In part it is a sequel to NEVER AGAIN! and in part it is all that I can now do instead of a book I'd planned and began researching more than 25 years earlier, Tiger to Ride: The Untold Story of the Cuba Missile Crisis.

I do not intend this book as a definitive explanation of or solution to the assassination. It is not that. Rather it is a statement of what is and always has been obvious and a further exposure of what should have been investigated officially at the time of the assassination -- what cried out to be investigated -- and was ignored in its entirety in all official investigations.

But then as I begin NEVER AGAIN! in saying and proving with previously kept secret official records I obtained in that FOIA litigation, there was an immediate official conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself. This conspiracy was agreed to as soon as it was known that Oswald had been killed and that there would be no trial.

Because the official investigation was not an investigation of the crime itself and was never intended to be, there is so much that was ignored, so much like what this book addresses that should not have been ignored, so much that it is really criminal was not done when there was the need for doing it! But as a result there are no leads in the disclosed official records for private persons to carry further in trying to identify those who conspired to kill the President. From the time of my first book there has not been any question about it, the misrepresented and ignored official evidence itself proves beyond question that the assassination was by a conspiracy. But who those conspirators were, those who turned this country and the world around with their successful conspiracy, remain unidentified and there is little hope of doing that ever beyond question. Thanks to what I have referred to as the official "Whitewash" and "Cover-Up."

So there is nothing those of us who care and who have subject-matter knowledge can do other than to make a record for our history.

That is why I have written this book at 81 and when in impaired health and so limited in what I am able to do.

I regret very much that there seems to be no prospect that it can be edited and published while I live. I am not able to travel and seek an agent and the long and painfully consistent record of the past is that agents do not want to represent books and authors with factual criticisms of the official assassination mythology. The record of publishers in the past is that of the agents, the reason the agents have this anti-American attitude. They make their living introducing books to publishers who have their own long record of this anti-American attitude the agents get from them.

Perhaps if I could travel I might find that there are new agents who do not have the monolithic attitude that handicapped me so. But it is even more hazardous for me to travel and I am even more limited. Just before beginning to write this book I learned that I have no functioning artery in either leg.

It may now also be that an author who published despite publisher refusal to publish him bears an extra curse for bypassing commercial publishers. Who more and more have been taken over by corporate conglomerates that do business with the government they do not want to offend.

The record of Richard Gallen and Carroll & Graf with whom he copublishes, their butchery of Case Open and their suppression of NEVER AGAIN!, has to be interpreted as forecasting that if they were to contract this book they then would suppress it, too.

So, unedited, when it is retyped it will be no more than a record on deposit in several academic institutions and with a few friends for the future, a future in which I hope it can be edited and published so the people may have access to what it puts together from what was always public and was never once put together so the people could read and understand it and reach their own conclusions about what it says.

John Kennedy did see to it that we can have a future. This work is for that future, so that the people may know some of what their governments decided they should not know and is suppressed from all official investigations.

Chapter 1: Reordering Our System and Our Country

Ours was created as a free and democratic country. Increasingly it is becoming neither. Increasingly it is becoming a militarized society and a society of official secrecy. Secrecy is anathema to both freedom and democracy.

This secrecy, we are told, is for our "national security. It is the exact opposite more often than not. It is, more often than not, a means of frustrating democracy, of keeping the people from knowing what they need to know for their democratic society to be viable, for them to be able to exercise the rights and the obligations of citizens in a democratic society.

In my efforts to rescue from oblivion official records that hold information belonging to the people as a matter of law, the FBI has withheld from me and thus from the people the well- known name of one of its agents a dozen times from a single newspaper story! (The clerk who perpetrated that outrage was rewarded by being promoted to special agent!) The CIA withheld even the name of a hotel and claimed that, too, it was required to do as a matter of what is actually referred to as "national security."

Neither agency was ever visibly embarrassed by the preposterous claims each made to keep secret what never had any real need to be kept secret.

During the Cold War, it was an every-day event to withhold from the American people what was very well known to the USSR. Aside from seeking to preserve the mystique of secrecy, the agencies had as their intent withholding from our people what was so very well known to the USSR and not to it alone.

Nothing was too ridiculous to be claimed and for the courts abjectly to accept what ranged from irrational and preposterous to outrageous and incredible.

Even when what it was claimed had to be kept secret lest the nation crumble or all our international relations disintegrate -- even that a war could be caused by it -- in one law suit included dozens of instances when the FBI claimed it had to keep its source secret to protect its flim-flam claim to "national security," after it had already disclosed the fact that the Royal Canadian Mounted Policy, the RCMP, was its source! It did this in several ways. One was in disclosing records in which it is stated that the RCMP was its source. In another, instead of the withheld records, it placed slip sheets in their stead and on them stated that the RCMP was its source -- for each and every one of those withheld documents, dozens of them!

When, ultimately, many of the withheld "national security" withholdings were disclosed, they were in all instances what there had been no rational reason for withholding. It then became clear in most instances that there were two basic reasons for those unjustified withholdings: just plain stonewalling to make the lawsuits more costly to people seeking information (with the costs to the government often being ever so much greater under those administrations that campaigned by claiming it would reduce waste and cut costs) or to avoid the possibility of official embarrassment over the information itself.

In the 1994 disclosures compelled by the 1992 there are, literally, hundreds of thousands of illustrations of this, of records that were withheld -- kept secret for 30 years for no legitimate reason at all. When they had to be disclosed it was obvious that they were withheld by lies and by perjury. Their disclosure did no harm of any kind to any proper government activity or function.

Without this official secrecy the Warren Report could never have been issued. It would not have been dared!

That Commission could not have survived the testimony it took if that testimony had not been taken in secret. The testimony not only did not seek the truth and obviously did not, and that in itself would have been a major scandal -- its own testimony says and means the exact opposite of what its Report says.

This is true also of the Commission's documentation -- it says and means the exact opposite of what the Commission said it means.

This is so obvious that I had completed my first book, which refutes the Report by its own evidence only, by mid-February, 1965 when that Report had not been made public until the end of September, 1964! In the almost three decades since then not a single error has been attributed to that book by all the official agencies that examined it closely seeking to fault it. Not a single one of the hundreds of people I name in it has written or phoned to complain of unfair treatment or of error.

And that book was rejected by more than 100 publishers internationally without a single adverse editorial comment. Several of the then largest publishers were honest enough to confess fear of publishing it.

That when broke and in debt I was able to publish it without anything happening to me should not be misunderstood. I had no books to sell to the government, which was the largest single purchaser of books in the country. I was not part of a corporate structure that depended on the sale of military equipment or what the military or other parts of the government bought.

There were and there are publishers who can be hurt by the government. Some can be hurt by the government merely not buying from them or from their corporate partners. The publisher who predicted Whitewash would be the best-selling book of 1965 and was anxious to publish it decided not to because six of his people were already under indictment for publishing a fraudulent book and its president did not want to be the seventh.

As the military became more important in modern society, under this new concept of what the national security requires it more and more assumed the rights and powers not its under our Constitution. Not under the beliefs and words of those most brilliant of the world's political thinkers, as I regard them, those referred to as our "founding fathers." The more this is done ours becomes less and less a free and a democratic society. The military, quietly, has more and more assumed the role and the authority of the civilian part of our government, even of the president the people elect to lead them and to enunciate and see to the enforcement of civilian policies and practices, which he was elected to do.

This was feared by our Founding Fathers, and in one of the most important of our treasured nationals documents that was stated explicitly. In the twenty-fifth of what when they were assembled were titled The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton write of the military that the people have more to fear from those they believe they have least to fear:

For it is a truth, which the experience of the ages has attested, that the people are commonly more in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion. (p. 164, Mentor Edition, New American Library, New York 1961)

Of what we have been permitted to piece together of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy despite the official secrecy in which its fraud of an investigation was conducted, Hamilton's words become frighteningly significant. They are startlingly prescient. He was Camelot's Merlin, "remembering" the future.

With the passing of time an old man is able to remember more and others are able in their own work to bring more to light, often with little or no attention to it, that is chilling relevant. The words of others whose opinions are worth considering can be written and spoken. Books that have other purposes also can tell us what is so shockingly relevant and report what was little or not known at all.

A letter from my friend Dal McGuirk, who is a historian and a "master" at Western Springs College, in Auckland, New Zealand and who is also a published military historian, reminded me of what I marked in an excellent book when I read it in 1965. That book is Pulitzer Historian Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, his book on the Kennedy administration in which he served in the White House. (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1965).

Its simple dedication is, "in memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy."

That simple page is followed by a page that holds only this quotation from Ernest Hemingway:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.

Apt as Schlesinger regarded this simple truth when he began his masterful book with it, there is now, as this book reflects, even more cause to regard them as an accurate account of what happened.

In our society, under our system of government, it is the President and he alone who sets national policy. This is true in theory but it is decreasingly true in practice. In practice, the military sets national policy, not infrequently a policy the exact opposite of that of the President. In this the military believes it serves the national interest and the "national security."

In this it is in fact subversive of our most basic concepts.

This is what I marked on page 338 of Schlesinger's book when I read it in 1965, where he writes about the President's conference with his military experts about the morass in which they were more and more bogging us down in Asia. It is followed by what I do not quote in full, what Schlesinger wrote about the military and about our Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba:

. . . The President was appalled at the sketchy nature of American military planning for Laos -- the lack of detail and the unanswered questions. One day they suggested sending troops into two airstrips in Pathet Lao territory; they could land a thousand troops a day, and there were 5000 enemy guerrillas nearby. Kennedy, after interrogation, discovered that the airstrips could only be used by day and that it would take a week or so for troops to reach them overland. He then asked what would happen if the Pathet Lao allowed the troops to land for two days and then attacked. The military did not seem to have thought of that.

For all their differences, the military left a predominant impression that they did not want ground troops at all unless they could send at least 140,000 men equipped with tactical nuclear weapons. By now the Pentagon was developing what would become its standard line in Southeast Asia -- unrelenting opposition to limited intervention except on the impossible condition that the President agree in advance to every further step they deemed sequential, including, on occasion, nuclear bombing of Hanoi and even Peking. At one National Security Council meeting General Lyman Lemnitzer outlined the processes by which each American action would provoke a Chinese counteraction, provoking in turn an even more drastic American response. He concluded: "If we are given the right to use nuclear weapons, we can guarantee victory." The President sat glumly rubbing his upper molar, saying nothing. After a moment someone said, "Mr. President, perhaps you would have the General explain to us what he means by victory." Kennedy grunted and dismissed the meeting. Later he said, "Since he couldn't think of any further escalation, he would have to promise us victory."

The Chiefs had their own way of reacting to the Cuban fiasco. It soon began to look to the White House as if they were taking care to build a record which would permit them to say that, whatever the President did, he acted against their advice. This had not yet been identified as a tactic, however, and in April 1961 their opposition to limited intervention had a powerful effect . . . .

(Another and entirely ignored quotation from this important book interests us later.)

The Joint Chiefs of Staff understand the Constitution as giving the military the decision between war and peace, not the congress, on the request of the President. They were going to provoke China so that China would have to react. That would lead to a stronger United States reaction until we would be dropping nuclear bombs.

Which, had they dropped, would not have been limited to that side of the world, the side most distant from us.

For the self-adopted role of gendarme to the world we were to set the world afire, the entire world, in the most permanent and deadliest of fires that are fatal thousands of miles from the immediate flames, where the nuclear bombs would be dropped, where the slaughter would exceed anything in history and as we will see, in an enormous area of the world.

While the military had ample civilian support for its policy of policing the world, all such decisions are by our Constitution denied to the military and are restricted to civilian government.

The military grew big and powerful in World War II. It then wanted to get even bigger and even more powerful so it could police the world.

As a direct result of which the streets in our cities became unsafe and daily grow even more unsafe.

If they could drop nuclear bombs wherever they chose, General Lyman Lemnitzer said "we can guarantee victory."

Victory? What kind of "victory" can there be once all the world's nuclear bombs are set off all over it?

"Victory" for us at home with nuclear bombs killing us by the millions and ruining the lives of even more of us?

So long before such terrible weapons of such unimaginable power could ever be dreamed about, when by comparison the most powerful weapon the military had was a broken toothpick, Hamilton was so very right in saying that the people have most to fear from those they believe they have least to fear, the military. And with the purpose of preventing exactly what has come to pass, one way or another, come hell or high water, Constitution or no Constitution, our Constitution prohibits this control over war or peace being by the military.

Which, one way or another, for all practical purposes got it anyway. And used it exactly as our Founding Fathers feared and thought they had prevented.

Does it not provoke wonder about the pertinence of Schlesinger's quotation from Hemingway when Kennedy's policy was the opposite of that of the military? He wanted not the world afire but the world at peace, as he said so eloquently at his American University speech the summer of 1963, his last summer.

"But those that will not break it killed kills"?

Some time after Schlesinger's book appeared I was visiting my friend the late Steve Barber. He then was the Washington correspondent of the conservative London Standard. Steve had been in Vietnam and had reported that war for some time. He was the first to confirm to me the obvious and fairly widespread belief that the body-count figures of enemy killed our military announced were fraudulent, grossly exaggerated. As I now after all these years recall what Steve told me it is that whatever the reporters did or did not report, this truth was known to all reporters in Vietnam, it was that obvious.

In those days government agencies regarded it as worse than a crime to be opposed to the government's obviously wrong Vietnam policies that, if the military did not have its own agenda, it would have avoided and counseled the President to avoid rather than encourage him in that policy. It created situations that would and did, inevitably, widen the war and deepen our involvement. Despite, as the military knew, they could conquer a country but they could not conquer a people who did not want to be conquered.

I recall no exception to the rule that the major media supported this wrongful policy and military activity -- an undeclared war. In general it reported the military's lies as established truth. It was critical of, even defamed, those in civilian life who spoke out against that war and those policies.

I was on the earliest protests against what we were doing in Vietnam. That expanded the files on me in those agencies for whom, under the theory at least of our form of government, it is quite wrong for them to be spying on and monitoring what any Americans say and believe.

When the early writers and editors protest against the war in Vietnam appeared the CIA, naturally for it, added to its files copies of our ad, one for each signer. The CIA marked a half- dozen names on it, usually betokening special interest or the know existence of files it had on us. I remember only Baby Doctor Benjamin Spock's name so marked in addition to mine. That was in 1966, after I had published Whitewash.

There were crimes for which the FBI lacked manpower because it devoted that manpower to its political police-statisms.

Those fraudulent military bodycount figures of claimed casualties on the other side and its claimed military successes that did not exist were reported as fact by all our media. In this the media deceived and misled us all. "All" includes the President who was given those very same figures. The inevitable and intended result is that the President was led to believe that the war was going favorably for us when the exact opposite was true.

Their deliberate military dishonest is a central consideration in all that ensued, all those fifty thousand Americans who were killed there, the many more thousands whose lives were seriously interfered with or ruined, the enormous addition to our national debt and taxes, the harm to the country from our industry's involvement with war production that hurts rather than helps the economy in the long run and the loss of jobs and markets from production for peacetime uses that was the alternative to military production.

Steve and I were talking about American policy in Vietnam. Remembering what I quote above from Schlesinger, I told Steve that it was the military's policy to get us into a war with China. He could not believe that if true it was public knowledge.

"Do you have Schlesinger's book?" I asked him.

"Yes, I do," he replied. "I've read it."

"Get it and look in the index under Lemnitzer," I told him.

He did and he was stunned.,

"How could I have missed that?" he asked himself.

That he could and did reflects the problem faced by honest reporters: the volume of what is available to them overwhelms them. They cannot possibly keep up with all they should know. The most likely explanation for Steve's missing it is that what immediately proceeds what I quote above relates to what he lived through and knew about, leading him to thumb over a couple of pages to save time.

Whatever explains it, I do not recall what Schlesinger reports being included in any of our media in any form. This is true also of what we quote from him later. Yet both are, without doubt, information that Americans should have, particularly those in and working for the Congress, which does appropriate the money the government spends and in that controls how it is spent and the purposes for which it is appropriated.

It is not easy to believe that all the papers missed what I quote or that if one had not, none of the others and the news agencies in particular would not have picked it up -- if it had been used.

In recent years the media has on many, especially foreign-policy matters, often been virtually an arm of government in its support of policies that depart from the American tradition and do violate our laws, international agreements, and treaties.

For a long time Vietnam was one example. Before that Korea was another. Very few Americans, including a new generation of reporters, know that the direct cause of each of those costly wars was the refusal of our side to permit the elections that had been agreed upon in international settlements after World War II.

We fought those wars because the sides that obviously would have won those elections were not the side we favored. While we talked about free elections, that was cold-war talk limited to where we believed "our" side would win. We started policing the world while we could not police ourselves at home and now we can police ourselves even less.

In each case the presidents were persuaded by the military and in each case and in all other similar cases (of which there are too many) politicians and the media made acceptable or essential what we did that violated international law, our treaty commitments and our own Constitution. This acceptability extended to fighting wars that under our Constitution we can fight only after Congress declares those wars.

In varying degrees and in innumerable places we have been de facto at war pretty much of the time since World War II.

Without war every being declared, as the Constitution requires, by the Congress.

Like all other presidents, John Kennedy inherited the policies of his predecessor. And like most, he depended on his advisors, particularly, in war situations, on the military.

In recent years a minor industry has sprung up. It is dedicated to rewriting our history during the thousand days of his presidency. It is also dedicated to undermining the public's affection for him and liking of his policies. To do this not only need our history be rewritten, he has to be portrayed as an entirely different man and an entirely different President than he was and than he wanted to be.

He was, really, two entirely different Presidents with radically different policies.

He changed those two weeks in October, 1962 when whether the world would be incinerated or not was his decision to make.

In what should be known as what I've always called it, the Cuba Missile Crisis rather than the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev gave Kennedy that decision to make. (I researched it for the book on it I planned while trying to get my first book published in 1965. The working title was Tiger to Ride: The Untold Story of the Cuba Missile Crisis. I was not able to get to that writing. In recent years, international conferences of those who were involved on both sides that got little attention from the major media have since confirmed my contemporaneous analysis that led to the book's title: in placing those missiles in Cuba Khrushchev gave Kennedy his own tiger to ride.)

Kennedy's decision that most of his advisors and all his military opposed was the right decision. The world did not go up in a nuclear holocaust and haltingly detente began.

In making the right decision Kennedy decided against what his advisors, particularly his military advisors, were pressing upon him, immediate military action. Had he followed the advice of his advisors at the time the Cuba Missile Crisis began, the likelihood is that the world would have suffered the unimaginable catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust.

When he realized how close the world had come to an unprecedented disaster he became what was generally referred to as a "dove." Despite fearing defeat in the Congress he began nuclear detente by initiating the limited test-ban agreement with the USSR. The beginning of the end of the nuclear disaster that is always possible is the beginning of the end of adding to the nuclear arsenal.

Thirty years later, we are pressing the rest of the world not to have their own nuclear weapons, most recently as I write this with such determination that the papers were holding forth the possibility of war with North Korea on that issue. And while we were supposedly leading the world in eliminating existing nuclear weapons, what we demand of others, we spend a fortune in money that increased the nation debt on designing and building new nuclear weapons.

For which there is no rational need after the disintegration of the USSR.

The military insists that we need them and the military gets what it wants.

Whether or not what it wants is needed or is good for us or for the world.

There are pressing national needs to be met that are not met and cannot be because there is no money for them. The lack of jobs is a direct cause of more crime than the country has ever suffered. It is the cause of unsafe roads and bridges, of millions of people having no homes and living in the streets.

It is the cause of our young people receiving less of the education they need for their lives and the country needs for its political and economic health while in those countries that do not waste their wealth on unneeded military supplies, equipment and bases, education improves and they prepare their people to be more productive and for them to be more competitive.

If only a fraction of the nuclear arsenal we already have were fired, much of the world could be wiped out.

But the military insists it needs new nuclear weapons -- and this after the cold-war enemy, the USSR, has not existed for several years -- and it is political suicide not to give the military what it wants.

The military has distributed its spending so well throughout the country that the economies of most states depend on that military production and on production for it as well as on its installations. It is political suicide for members of the Congress from most states not to vote for unneeded wasteful, and wasted military appropriations. Moreover, until that production can be replaced by production for our real needs, ending it creates massive unemployment. There is now no substitute for those jobs, because since World War II there was no planning for peacetime, non-military production to replace those jobs and that production.

We have created for ourselves with these policies that were and are the policies of our military a self-perpetuating potentially nuclear and an economic, social and political holocaust.

Meanwhile, our enemies of World War II, Germany and Japan, with our assistance as what was regarded as essential in the Cold War, have modern industrial plants that we do not have and with our help and our startup money have taken much of our industry and markets away from us. From being the world's largest exporter of what other people need we have become the world's largest importer of what our people need. Each and every job lost is also a loss also to the nation. Each and every dollar spent abroad is an addition to the national debt and under the most military-minded of our recent administrations, those of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, climbed to four times what all presidents before them accumulated as our national debt. All the national debt of our entire history accumulated from before Ronald Reagan became President was multiplied four times by the time his successor, George Bush, was voted out of office.

As a result our society and our cities are disintegrating.

While condemning non-existing "welfare queens" who allegedly drove for their welfare checks in Cadillacs and cutting all he could of expenditures needed by many of our people, particularly mothers who were on welfare, Reagan lavished the national treasure on what the military did not need and he did this with such extravagance that a common hammer was billed to the government for as much as some people saw in a week.

Not only did he lavish on the military what it did not need, he was no less generous with what did not work when it was built.

Our national policy was and remains largely one of cutting all that is possible and of basic need to the country and to people to the bone while wasting multi-billions that go to those who finance political campaigns through their ownership of the means of military production and those who profited from it in other ways while the education our young was getting grew poor.

Those countries that did not build all the missiles we built with all those warheads for them, all the planes that could not do what they were intended to do, that did not deny real and existing needs to be able to adventure in space, prospered. Their young were better educated than were our young people and because of that were better able to do what economic growth and efficient production requires.

Their infant mortality rate declined while ours climbed.

All their people have excellent medical care when many of ours have none at all and the effort to provide it was frustrated when President Clinton sought to have it enacted in 1994. What the rest of the developed world had we could not afford to pay for.

But we could and did pay for what immediately followed it, sending our 64th shuttle into space. Its September, 1994 mission was, in the words of the AP story in the Washington Post of September 16, to study "the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere, to gather information about solar wind," which "can disrupt radio communications." For that project a special "$7 million clip-on jet pack" was developed so that in space repairs could be made without being tethered to the missiles.

That money was not available for doing something about the air we breathe and makes so many ill, killing some. The fortune required to send that shuttle into space to test that clip-on jet pack to make repairs in space easier and safer could not be spent on the bridges on earth that are in danger of crumbling or have been closed as unsafe, nor could it be spent on the repairs so many essential highways need the funds for their repair and maintenance having been devoted to the military and to exciting but hardly essential adventures in space.

There are published reports of military aviation being developed to fly at Mach 7 -- seven times the speed of sound -- and of a SR-75 "Penetrator" plane to replace the S-71 Blackbird spy plane and doing that a three and a half times the speed of sound.

We need them? Today, after the USSR is no longer a threat?

Even before the USSR came apart, there was no real need for these costly toys for the fly- boys and the spooks. After the USSR disintegrated there is no rational excuse for denying urgent national needs for such unneeded military extravagance.

Not when on earth there is urgent need for public transportation, for one example, for housing those who live on the streets, for jobs for those without jobs, for better education and medical care for those who do not have these basics of life.

Or for doing the one thing that can reduce crime, giving those who engage in crime something else to do, some other means of meeting life's costs.

There was so much real need for the money that was wasted in these ways that were and are not necessary! Yet to oppose them and demand that instead the existing and real needs be met was for most political suicide.

Billions for supersonic flight and for space while normal transportation on earth is inadequate and unsafe, while on land libraries and schools are closed part-time because of a lack of money.

Our sense of values, of importance and of needs got and remains completely skewed.

Chapter 2: Vietnam -- "Deception, Intrigue and the Struggle for Power

Damn John Kennedy as those who prospered from these self-destructive policies may, and do, after the Cuba Missile Crisis he started trying to change our national policy. He made this clear in his June 1963 American University speech. He made it clear in sending Averill Harriman to negotiate the limited nuclear test-ban agreement. He made it clear in military production he cancelled and in some that he tried to end but could not.

And despite what the revisionists tell us, he had decided to get us out of Vietnam after the election he would have lost had he begun that openly before the election.

His beginnings of this are a matter of record. So also are his intentions when he spoke to those he trusted, including some of those who were openly for our withdrawal from Vietnam when he was not.

There is little that cannot be twisted and given a meaning other than it has but he never intended to send combat troops there and this is the real meaning of his changed policy.

In it he was frustrated by the military and its political allies.

During the first week of June, 1968, I conducted the interviews for a then popular radio program, "Authors' Roundtable," at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association. It was held in the Shoreham Hotel, in Washington.

One of those I interviewed was retired Army General James Gavin. He had been known as Kennedy's intellectual general. Gavin had a book just out. I asked him about Kennedy's reported intention of getting us out of Vietnam. In reply Gavin told me what since has been public knowledge and, as we now know, is recorded in the then secret National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263. Gavin said that Kennedy had ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 of our "advisers" in Vietnam by the end of that year and had decided to get us out entirely after the election.

Gavin also told me, and I am confident these are close to his exact words, that Kennedy was calling some generals in and saying and asking, "Vietnam is a political problem. What can I do to convince you that political problems are not susceptible of military solutions?"

This is confirmed in their 1972 book by the two men who outside his family were closest to Kennedy from the time he first ran for the House of Representatives, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. It is the first-person accounts of Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers (Little, Brown and Company, Boston.) In the White House O'Donnell was the appointments secretary by title, the one who controls who sees the president, when and for how long. He was also the staff administrator. Like Powers, he was Kennedy's confidant and frequent companion. As their book says about them in the White House they had a closer personal relationship with the President than anyone other than his brother Robert. Powers served many roles but in fact he was "a guy that President Kennedy liked to have around him as much as possible." The book is mostly first- person O'Donnell. Press Secretary Pierre Salinger described O'Donnell as the most powerful and influential man of all Kennedy had in the White House. As they say in discussing Kennedy and Vietnam toward the end of their book,

The President had viewed Vietnam as a political problem, rather than a military crisis, and he had hoped that the fighting between Diem's Saigon government and the Communist Viet Cong could be stopped by political compromising on both sides to work out a truce and a settlement such as he and Averell Harriman had effected in Laos in 1961 with Khrushchev's help. Such a solution became impossible because Diem's fanatical bother and sister-in-law, the Nhus, persecuting and terrorizing non-Communist political enemies and carrying on religious warfare against nonpolitical Buddhists, had turned the Saigon regime into a police state with no popular support. (page 435)

While it may be suspected that because of their closeness to Kennedy these men are biased, there is virtually nothing that I quote here or later that does not have confirmation. That they loved the man does not make them dishonest or inaccurate.

I also draw heavily on Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days, from the 1969 Signet paperback edition. (Signet is a subsidiary of The New American Library, New York.) Robert was with him when others were not. He understood him and the workings of his mind better than others did. Not only is the closeness and trust of their relationship the opposite of disqualification, Robert's writing is confirmed by that of others not limited to O'Donnell and Powers.

Within my experience, and I have not by any means exhausted the literature, the best book on JFK and Vietnam has that title. (Warner Books, New York, 1993). It is by John Newman. When he wrote it he was a major in Army intelligence and for 25 years was an academic who studied and taught Asian history. He had access to official records, particularly those of the Army, and to innumerable people who had first-hand knowledge of what he wrote about. He begins his book with full credit to them. The book's subtitle is also descriptive of its contents, Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power.

Newman's research is impressive, as are his sources. So is the organization of his book and his success in handling complicated and contradictory information and making it readily accessible and comprehensible. I regard it as an exceptional achievement and as a landmark account of one of history's turning points, of one of the greatest and least necessary and costly tragedies in our history.

As Schlesinger did, Newman begins with an apt quotation, his from Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well:

The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtue.

By the time we get 460 pages later he has put together, whatever intent he may have had, if any, other than recording this most significant event in our history, a solid, and irrefutable case of the military's most deliberate dishonesty, deception, manipulation, contrivance and overt mendacity for the sole and successful military purpose of undoing national policy as stated by the President; of doing the exact opposite of what he wanted and ordered done; of creating situations that prevented what he wanted being done from being possible; of manufacturing situations and statistics that limited his options to what the military wanted and he did not; and almost within minutes of his assassination had changed the policy statement he had drafted of his intended NSAM-273 to the precisely opposite of what he began it with and intended it to accomplish, to bring to pass. It was LBJ's NSAM-273.

Just before the assassination there was a conference in Honolulu to ostensibly get things straight, understood all around and recorded. JFK confronted constant military opposition to his policy. It was held Wednesday night, November 19, at Camp Smith, on Hawaii. That was three days before the assassination. Among the matters to be worked out was the withdrawal of those 1,000 men ordered in NSAM-263. As Newman quotes The Pentagon Papers as saying this turned out to be "essentially an accounting exercise" consisting mostly "of the normal turnover cycle." (page 433)

Newman details what was to have happened, the units from which those 1,000 men were to have come (pages 432-3) and how it was to be negated, the details being handled by a couple of clerks.

In his chapter "The Drums after Dallas" Newman details the changes made in NSAM 273 after Kennedy was assassinated, changes that made it the exact opposite of what he wanted. (pp. 438 ff) As Newman writes, "NSAM-273 was a significant escalation of the war." (page 446) What was added to it created what became known as The Gulf of Tonkin incident, an incident created by the military for the expansion of the war: "The dam broke when NSAM-273 was rewritten four days after Kennedy's assassination." (page 447)

He ends this chapter quoting Kennedy as having told his assistant and close friend Kennedy O'Donnell:

. . . While Kennedy had told O'Donnell in the spring of 1963 that he could not pull out of Vietnam until he was reelected, "So we had better make damned sure I am reelected," at a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: "Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war.

Newman's source for the Johnson quote is Stanley Karnow's book Vietnam.

It would undoubtedly be a mistake and a very big mistake to believe that all of the many in the military who were involved in this deliberate subversion of our system of government understood it that way at all, not any more than the Oliver Norths did and do. They without doubt arranged for what they believed was the country's need for its "national security." I do not doubt that in their minds what they did was patriotic, what their responsibilities required of them - - as they understood their responsibilities.

But they were wrong in what they did, how they did it and why they did it.

The political battlecry of those who want our growth and development to be backward has long been "Are we a government of laws or a government of men?" They are the strongest supporters of the military. But in practice as Newman illustrates and so overwhelmingly makes clear, the military made policy when that is the sole responsibility of the President under our system; and the policy it made, which was the opposite of that of the President, was one of the nation's greatest and lingering disasters, with great economic , political, social, physical and emotional costs that linger and while in diminished volume still cause great suffering and even murders.

This happened because the military violated what our Constitution makes clear and without question in assuming rights and responsibilities denied it by the Constitution.

That it came to a head, that the policy was changed entirely around from what it was to prevent into what it became as soon as Kennedy was assassinated -- completed, wrapped up -- signed and sealed within four days -- inevitably points fingers of suspicion at the military.

By Kennedy's assassination it got what he was denying it.

To the nation's great cost and everlasting shame.

It also got our first defeat in a war, the war they wanted and got.

As is true of much in our history, this is disputed by those who came to be called by a word that describes them with more generosity than is warranted, as "revisionists." They do not merely "revise" our history to correct error or misunderstanding. They rewrite it to give it an entirely different meaning. With President Kennedy, they rewrite it to hold him responsible for our initial involvement and for the catastrophic consequences of the military's policies that began with Eisenhower and as they were implemented by the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

These rewritings of our history within the lifetime of those who are to be and were influenced by turning it all around began with the efforts to give an entirely different meaning to and responsibility for the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, an invasion by Cubans who had fled Cuba when Castro's revolution succeeded in throwing out the last of the earlier dictatorships that country suffered that began when the United States went to war with Spain at the turn of the century. Whether or not, as many Cubans believed and believe they were about to free themselves from the Spanish yoke, the fact is that those military dictatorships were all with United States support and resulted in United States interests taking control of that poor country's economy. The country was still so poor after more than a half century of United States domination that when Castro defeated the Batista dictatorship, with Batista and his gang getting refuge in the United States, most Cubans had no shoes and could not read and write. The unsuccessful invasion at the Bay of Pigs was in fact what Kennedy inherited from the Eisenhower administration. What Kennedy also inherited from the Eisenhower administration, and what also controlled United States policy for him rather then as President setting that policy, was the unusual act of the outgoing Eisenhower administration in breaking relations with Cuba just before Kennedy's inauguration. That decision, by tradition, should be the decision not of the outgoing administration but of the one that replaced it. What let to it, a separate story, was the direct result of usury of the Cuban economy by United States corporations, particularly in petroleum.

A little-known part of the history was reported by Watergater E. Howard Hunt in his 1974 book, Undercover: Memoirs of An American Secret Agent. (New York, Berkeley Publishing Corporation/C. Putnam's Sons)

In it he says of Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president and the man Kennedy defeated to become President, "Secretly, however, he was the White House action officer for our covert project." Hunt refers to the CIA in saying "our."

If that invasion has succeed, Hunt writes, "I was to fly there with the provisional government" he and the CIA had handpicked to take over. (page 131) Hunt, of the right political extreme, was also to write the constitution for the government of which he was to be the political guide.

Referring to a meeting Kennedy later had with General Douglas MacArthur, O'Donnell and Powers say:

The President later gave us a rundown of MacArthur's remarks. He was extremely critical of the military advice that the President was getting from the Pentagon, blaming it on the military leadership of the previous ten year which, he said, had advanced the wrong officers. "You were lucky to have the mistake happen in a place like Cuba, where the strategic cost was not too great," he said about the Bay of Pigs, and urged the President not to listen too carefully to advisers who favored a military buildup in Vietnam. (page 13-4)

Later in their book, where they deal with Vietnam, the advice of both of these authorities is repeated in slightly different words:

Charles de Gaulle sent word that we could expect no military help from France under any circumstances. He explained to Kennedy later in Paris that he would support the United States in a total war against Russia, but after his own bitter experience of fighting in Southeast Asia during the early 1950s, he wanted not part of warfare in that area of the world. "You should stay out of there, too," he added emphatically. (page 304)

and,

As General Douglas MacArthur remarked privately to the President, he was lucky to have learned so much about the value of his military advice from an operation like the Bay of Pigs disaster, where the strategic cost was small. (page 313)

Manfully, Kennedy assumed full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs military fiasco he had wished on him by the Eisenhower/Nixon administration and which he confronted soon after he was sworn in, when there wasn't a thing he could do about it with all those Cuban invaders armed and trained in Guatemala. Kennedy's full acceptance of responsibility was well received by the people. It made him popular and he was regarded as honest. He did not say a word about having inherited a project of the previous administration which had arranged it so that he would have no real choice. We have more on this later.

These two men who were so close to Kennedy beginning with his first campaign for Congress also say at the same point in their book:

President Kennedy first began to have doubts about our military effort in Vietnam in 1961 when both General Douglas MacArthur and General Charles de Gaulle warned him that the Asian mainland was no place to be fighting a non- nuclear land war. There was no end to Asian manpower, MacArthur told the President, and even if we poured a million American infantry soldiers into that continent, we would still find ourselves outnumbered on every side. De Gaulle said the same thing in Paris that spring, pointing out that the French had shown us the hopelessness of trying to fight in that country. (page 13)

Nonetheless, regardless of this excellent advice from men with the experience to know what they spoke about, the President did get advice from his government. As O'Donnell and Powers write early in their book, it was sometimes unhelpful:

During most of President's Kennedy's time in office, most of 1961 and all of 1962, the situation in Southeast Asia was overshadowed by the more urgently dangerous threat of a nuclear war with Russia over the crisis in Berlin and then over the missile crisis in Cuba. When the President began to be able to pay more attention to Vietnam after the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba late in 1962, he found himself frustrated by the conflicting reports from his own observers in Saigon. One day at a National Security Council meeting, he listened to a Marine general and a State Department officer who had just returned from South Vietnam on the same plane. The Marine general said that the war was going fine and that the Diem government, then in power, was strong and popular. The State Department man said that the Diem government was on the verge of collapse. The President said, "We were you two gentlemen in the same country?" (page 14)

Writing of Kennedy's Christmas holiday 1962 meeting with the Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, for whom he had considerable respect, Mansfield having just returned from a trip to Southeast Asia, they write:

Mansfield emphatically advised a curb on sending more military reinforcements to South Vietnam and then a withdrawal of U.S. troops from that country's civil war, a suggestion that shocked the President. A continued steady increase of Americans in South Vietnam, the Senator argued, would lead to sending still more forces to beef up those that were there, and soon the Americans would be dominating the combat in a civil war that was not our war. Taking over the military leadership and fighting in the Vietnam war, Mansfield warned, would hurt American prestige in Asia and would not help the South Vietnamese to stand on their own feet, either. The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him." (page 15)

This man Kennedy so "deeply respected," his Senate majority leader, kept pressing the same wise counsel on him:

In the spring of 1963, Mike Mansfield again criticized our military involvement in the Vietnam war, this time in front of the Congressional leadership at a White House breakfast, much to the President's annoyance and embarrassment. Later the President asked me to invite Mansfield to his office for a private talk on the problem. I sat in on part of the discussion. The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

"But I can't do it until 1965 -- after I'm reelected," Kennedy told Mansfield.

President Kennedy explained, and Mansfield agreed with him, that if he announced a withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term.

After Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, "In 1965, I'll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected." (page 16)

As these two who were so close to Kennedy, continue their first-person account,

On October 2, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor came to a meeting of the National Security Council to report on a trip to Saigon, President Kennedy asked McNamara to announce to the press after the meeting the immediate withdrawal of one thousand soldiers and to say that we would probably withdraw all American forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965. When McNamara was leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called to him, "And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too."

McNamara discreetly softened the President's prediction of a complete 1965 withdrawal in his on-the-record statement to the press: he merely said that in his judgment "the major part of the U.S. military task" in Vietnam could be "completed by the end of 1965."

President Kennedy made no move to change or cancel his troop reduction order when he heard the news of the killing of Diem and Nhu in the uprising of South Vietnamese generals against their government on November 1, just before we went to Texas. The collapse of the Diem government and the deaths of its dictatorial leaders made President Kennedy only more skeptical of our military advice from Saigon and more determined to pull out of the Vietnam war. General Paul Harkins, then our military commander in South Vietnam, had been reporting all along that Diem had strong popular support. (page 16)

As Newman made so clear, the military with its own agenda said what suited its purpose without regard for truth.

"Up until the time of his death," O'Donnell says, "he was determined to limit American military assistance to Vietnam to technicians, helicopter pilots and Green Beret advisers -- no combat troops and no bombers." (page 303)

But as he told O'Donnell and others the month before he was assassinated, "They keep telling me to send combat troops over there. That means sending draftees, . . . I'll never send draftees over there to fight." The month before that Kennedy told Walter Cronkite of CBS News,

"It is their war," the President said to Cronkite. "They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can send them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers . . . but in the final analysis it is their people and their government who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is help." (page 436)

In discussing a November, 1961 conference Kennedy had with those he had sent to Vietnam to learn and report to him what the situation there actually was, Richard Reeves says "he was not willing to send in U.S. combat troops." Reeves quotes notes made by Vice President Lyndon Johnson's military aide, Colonel Harold Burris: "He questioned the wisdom of involvement in Vietnam . . . The President said that he could even make a rather strong case against intervening in an area 10,000 miles away against 16,000 guerrillas with a native army of 200,000, where millions had been spent for years with no success." (President Kennedy: Profile of Power, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993, page 259.) The "native army" was that of the Diem government.

Reeves also reports that Kennedy rejected "the first option, a $75 million Air Force plan to kill everything green over 32,000 square miles of South Vietnam, almost half the country."

What a way to "save" an agricultural country and its people -- by ending the capacity of half of it to grow food -- and showering them with carcinogens at the same time!

As Reeves continues on the next page,

At the end of the long meeting, after hearing General Lemnitzer argue again that communism must be stopped in Vietnam or it would engulf most of Asia, Kennedy said again that he was not sure he could justify sending troops around the globe to Vietnam while there was a Communist government ninety miles offshore in Cuba. "Mr. President," Lemnitzer said, "speaking for the Joint Chiefs, we feel we should go into Cuba, too."

When Kennedy used civilians he trusted to learn the actualities, he got a picture the exact opposite of what his military imposed upon him:

As a check on his tough guys, Kennedy also told John Kennth Galbraith to take a look at Vietnam on his way back to his ambassador's post in India. Galbraith could write reports as fast, as colorful, and as certain as Rostow's. He did not disappoint, cabling the President on November 21 that troops were not the problem. Diem had "a comparatively well-equipped army with paramilitary formations numbering a quarter million men . . . facing a maximum of fifteen to eighteen thousand lightly armed men. If this were equality, the United States would hardly be safe from the Sioux . . . .

(Walt Rostow was one of the more articulate of the hawks in government.)

Meanwhile, he was resisting pressure to bomb North Vietnam. (page 260)

If Kennedy had listened to the Leminitzers he would have been invading Cuba and Vietnam simultaneously, on opposite sides of the world.

O'Donnell and Powers conclude what they write at this point about JFK and his determination to get us out of Vietnam after the coming election:

The President's order to reduce the American military personnel in Vietnam by one thousand men before the end of 1963 was still in effect on the day before he went to Texas. A few days after his death, during the mourning, the order was quietly rescinded. (page 18)

They refer to what as of the time of their writing was still denied the American people as the requirement of "national security," the since-disclosed NSAMs 263 and 273.

Mansfield was not alone among those who were vigorously opposed to our involvement in Vietnam Kennedy told of his plans. Senator Wayne Morse was another. And then there were the generals to whom he spoke, like Gavin, who in 1968 told me about Kennedy's decision to get us out, long before the declassification of those NSAMs that do record that part of history.

Much of this is the personal-knowledge account of these two men where were closer to the President than any others than his family, in personal relationships and in their official White House responsibilities. They return later in their book to both Cuba and Vietnam, as we also do.

We do it for a reason other than they did in their basically chronological warm and quite personal account.

Chapter 3: Cuba and The Bay of Pigs

From the time of the assassination and particularly after the highly-touted Warren Report was so widely disbelieved, there have been many theories of the assassination as a conspiracy. However, there is virtually nothing in the official evidence that in and of itself is either proof of who conspired -- and as had been obvious since my first book, the official facts do prove that there had been a conspiracy -- or is lead material so solid that all other possibilities are eliminated.

Theorizing about a crime is as proper as theorizing about anything else as a means of thinking it through, of trying to understand it, of deciding between areas of research and inquiry. However, presenting unproven theories as fact, what most of the books on the subject and their authors do, is to deceive, mislead and misinform trusting readers and it rewrites our tragic history while giving aid and comfort to official miscreants.

Analyzing what is known, particularly what is officially established as fact, cannot by itself pinpoint the conspiring assassins. It and knowledge of the official evidence, however, can eliminate many of the theories advanced by those I refer to as Inside JFK Assassination Industry in a lengthy book manuscript of that title.

The first of the theorized conspiracies to get much attention were of official inspiration because they came from official leaks, in Texas and in Washington. Both blamed the left, in itself irrational. One was that the USSR did it, the other than Castro did.

When a president is killed, his successor is known. Our system provides that he will be succeeded by his vice president. It makes no sense at all for the USSR or Castro to have the known dove Kennedy knocked off to have him replaced by the known hawk Johnson. Khrushchev and Kennedy had been groping toward detente since they settled the Cuba Missile Crisis. In this effort they exchanged some 40 letters, and each took affirmative political steps toward detente. Khrushchev wanted peace as much as Kennedy and he needed it ever so much more. His country was far from recovered from the unprecedented devastation visited upon it by Hitler. In that war it lost 20 million people and much of its industry. Its standard of living was low compared to other major countries. Before the war it had a poor and inadequate industrial base the war reduced significantly.

The solution to the Cuba Missile Crisis was an insurance policy Castro could not get from any other country or combination of countries. Kennedy guaranteed him to a greater extent than O'Donnell and Powers detail later in their book. Kennedy assured Cuba not only against any American invasion. He assured it that it would not be invaded by any country.

Not only was this more protection than Khruschev could give Cuba, at the very time of the assassination Kennedy was negotiating with Castro in an effort to reach a modus vivendi, and he was going that on two different levels. One level was diplomatic, the other informal. On the diplomatic level it was with our William Attwood and the Cuban ambassador at the United Nations. Informally it was through the noted French correspondent Jean Daniel. Daniel had interviewed Kennedy just before his Dallas trip. Kennedy asked him to feel Castro out about their settling of the differences and to come back and report to him after his scheduled interview with Castro. It happened that he was with Castro when they got word of Kennedy's assassination. From Daniel's description of Castro's appearance even more than from his spontaneous words there is no doubt that Castro was completely surprised and terribly upset by the news, which he described as very bad news for the world. Daniel also write a series of articles about this for The New Republic, which I have on file.

It makes no sense at all that the left killed Kennedy to get Johnson, not only that Khruschev and Castro each had reasons for preferring Kennedy to Johnson.

The anti-Castro Cubans were always suspected by many, in part because of their anger over their misguided believe that he had let them down and in part because in this country so many of them were so very violent in speech and in acts.

Another of the earliest theories is that the Vietnamese did it to avenge the killing of Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu who directed the terror by which they remained in power. Some theorized that Nhu's "dragon lady" wife was behind it for her revenge. That Kennedy did not order or cause those killings but rather did nothing to prevent them -- they were by Diem's own army -- does not rule the dragon-lady theory out. However, there is nothing but suspicion, no fact, no evidence, to support that theory. Nor can it be made to dovetail with what is known about the facts of the crime and its covering up and whitewashing.

Not nearly as often expressed but one of the early theories is that our own military was behind the assassination. The reason given for it is its violent disagreement with Kennedy's policies, the restrains he imposed upon it and his effort to reduce appropriations for it.

I know of no proof that there was such a conspiracy, by his own military to assassinate its commander in chief.

However, there is ample reason to ask the questions, as I do in Never Again! "Was There a Military Conspiracy?"

This is true also of the several variants of the military-conspiracy belief.

One formulation is that it was by "the military-industrial complex," the description of this complex of Eisenhower's farewell address. From the time he spoke them I have thought of it as the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

There are intelligence agencies that are not organically part of the military, like the CIA and the National Security Agency, the NSA. There are also military intelligence agencies that are almost never mentioned in these theories, like the Office of Naval Intelligence, the ONI.

While I have never believed that the CIA as an institution was behind the assassination. there also were variants of that theory. One is that it was self-starters from the Cuban component. Another that it was of self-starters who had worked in the Vietnam or Southeast Asia area.

When I was asked about these years ago, and I've not been asked about them in years, I also suggested that either of any such self-starters could have contrived to make it look like the other was responsible.

That there could have been some kind of intelligence involvement coincided with the fairly widespread belief that Oswald had had some such connection.

While some motive can be attributed to each of these suspected groups and not unreasonably to some others (which is to say that some of these theories are unreasonable), like Texas oil interests, from the available evidence, by which I mean official evidence, and from the public record, a stronger and more creditable motive case can be attributed to the military or the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

(Although the French equivalent of the CIA, then known as SDECE, did not originate the Texas-oil conspiracy theory, the fake book it turned out when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was getting extensive attention with his theory that the jury ruled against in less than an hour, its book did impress many. That book, originally titled L'Amerique Brule, roughly America Burns, was retitled Farewell America at Garrison's suggestion. It is so libellous it could not be published or imported into this country but some copies did cross over from Canada.)

The record of the military in the assassination inquiry is set forth in my NEVER AGAIN!. Here we use what was in the public domain to address motive. Did the military, any part or parts of it, with or without the industrial complex or intelligence agencies being involved, have motive for wanting Kennedy killed? Which also means preferring Johnson to be President. If so, what was the motive or motives or what could they have been?

As we shall see, each branch of the military can be said to have had some motive, some perhaps more than others. But it was the Navy that was involved in the so-called investigation of the crime. To refer to its record on the autopsy as merely abominable is to praise it. And then, too, Oswald was a Marine, and the Marines are part of the Navy.

It can be argued, not without reason, that pretty much of the motive that can be attributed to the military can be attributed to the industry that supplies it and in many if not most major instances could not survive without the tax money it gets through the military. However, on the basis of what is known, this is but supposition. I know of no fact to support the justified suspicion.

The most obvious basis for suspecting the military is the breadth and depth of its very strong disagreements with President Kennedy's policies. In its simplest formulation, he was very strongly, determinedly for peace, peace throughout the world. He had a record of seeking peace with Khrushchev and with Castro and of wanting it in Southeast Asia. The military was not for peace and it regarded Cuba and the USSR as enemies with whom in its belief we were virtually at war in anyway.

The military exists for war. Whether a war of defense only or not, it exists to be able to fight wars. Without those wars there are few promotions, fewer successful careers. This does not mean that as a result the military is always looking for a war to start so the careers of those near and at the top can prosper and that those of lower rank can advance in rank. It also does not mean that in all instances this is not in varying degree true. It can be the attitude of some and not the attitude of others. But it is an obvious fact that without war careers do not prosper as much and advances are not as easy or as common. Moreover, the more men there are in the military and the more equipment it has the better the chances for flourishing careers and for promotions. And for what since World War II in particular has been important to retirees or higher rank, the possibilities of cushy jobs after retirement in those industries that are related to the military, the industries that in themselves also require wars for production from which they make money. The threat of war is for both the military and military-related industry a substitute for a shooting war.

It is not only in its Bay of Pigs fiasco and in Vietnam that the military did not get what it wanted from President Kennedy. It was determinedly opposed to his handling of the October 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis.

I have and I have read most of the books by those involved in varying degrees and capacities in the Cuba Missile Crisis as well as the magazine articles some of them wrote. I read and annotated them with care for the book I then planned, Tiger to Ride. For that book I also followed developments in Asia with some care. I was, for example, able to prepare a contemporaneous analysis of the Tonkin Gulf Incident -- when it happened -- that was subsequently confirmed by the books about it. It was to me obvious that the military cooked that one up and did that carelessly. Analysis of what the military disclosed and was not made by the by the major media proved it.

There likewise continued to be provocations of Cuba most of which got too little attention at the time, like the arrest of innocent Cuban fishermen on the high seas and taking them to Key West only to be forced to turn them and their boats loose because they had done nothing wrong. There were projects to assassinate Castro a few of which got to be known, not nearly all of which he knew about, however. I knew of one that almost succeeded. It was told of it by Douglas Lethbridge, a man who knew Castro from their boyhood and who worked form him until he defected. Lethbridge told me that if Castro had not switched jeeps after a rest stop he would have been killed when the jeep in which he had been riding was hit with a rocket. Lethbridge then was with Castro, with whom he was then close. Later he was part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Of the serious efforts to overthrow Castro and to kill him the best-known of them disclosed later was Operation Mongoose. Of the assassination attempts the best known is the one for which the CIA used the mafia leaders, Sam "Momo" Giancana and Johnny Roselli.

Castro once disclosed his knowledge of some two dozen such plots of Members of Congress and then, later, to the House assassins committee. He was so well informed his ambassador to the United Nations disclosed some of what he knew. I have copies of the official texts of some of those United Nations transcripts in which he reported United States efforts to overthrow his government. I do not recall seeing them reported by our media, public as they were.

The Miami-Cuban refugee community leaked like a sieve and Castro's intelligence picked up all it leaked.

In Vietnam, the Viet Cong opposition to the governments we began by imposing on the country had those governments and its military thoroughly penetrated. It also learned of military operations from its wide support throughout all of the country, from the peasants in the villages to the upper echelons of the military and the government. There were few secrets from it.

Essentially, what was secret about what we were up to with regard to Cuba and Vietnam was secret from the American people only. However, much was reported later, long after the fact. Some of this was in books. The books were able to and in fact did contain considerable detail. Of the books I have and have read I select this largely O'Donnell book because of his closeness to the President, whose trust he had and to whom the President spoke as he did not speak to others. That it is a personal book qualifies it rather than disqualifying it. Robert Kennedy wrote his Thirteen Days about the Cuba Missile Crisis. He was a key participant in what was known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council or the "Ex Comm" from whom the President sought advice and who presented possible responses to Khrushchev to him. The fact is, however, that at the moment of greatest crisis it was Robert Kennedy who made the suggestion that became the solution to that crisis that, without resolution, could have led to nuclear war. Almost all of the others on the Ex Comm were for an immediate attack on Cuba and some of them never changed their beliefs.

Deeply troubling is the fact that despite the number of these books and the importance of what they report to free and representative society, to democratic society, what they report is for all practical purposes still secret from so many Americans. They got scant attention in the major media. The same major media that did not report the news when it was news and when the people could be informed and could be heard. With regard to Vietnam this led to that great disaster to us and to that country and its people. With regard to Cuba innocent Cubans, not Castro, suffered and continue to suffer while pretty much the rest of the world condemns us for what we did and are doing. The unseen costs to us are great, and the greatest cost was narrowly averted with the President's acceptance of his brother's proposed solution that originated with Khrushchev and that with Robert Kennedy's modifications of it Khrushchev accepted.

All of this and more like it throughout the world of which our people know so extraordinarily little underscores at once the wisdom if not also the prescience of our Founding Fathers in their believe in the importance of freedom to think and to speak, embodied in the first amendment, and of the great hazard to democratic society from official secrecy.

That the first amendment assures the press of freedom from the government's control does not assure us of a free press. It protects the press from the government but it does not protect the people from restrictions imposed by the press on what it reports to the people so that the people may know and try to be heard.

If this were not true what I write about would not be virtually entirely unknown to the people. Almost all the information I use is available to everyone.

Aside from the malfunctions of our society that were of such great danger and cost to us, one result is disenchantment with both the government and the media by the people who, while lacking the fact and the details, have a good gut understanding that tells them not to trust either their government or their media. This is amply reflected in the more than 20,000 letters and innumerable phone calls to me for those who are strangers, people who thank me for my work.

This does track back to Hamilton's warning about the military. For our present purposes to the military with regard to both Cuba and Vietnam in particular but not it exclusively in Asia. If one includes the CIA in the military-industrial-intelligence complex modification of Eisenhower's warning, it fits in with the military.

From the very first the military wanted to attack Cuba. The flyboy generals never stopped wanting to drop bombs, even after the crisis was resolved!

Most of the civilians of that Ex Comm supported the military in its aching to start a war that, with the USSR required by treaty to go to Cuba's defense, could have meant World War III and a terrible nuclear holocaust. The most bitter-ending of these civilians who wanted to attack Cuba was Dean Acheson. As Secretary of State he was the actual author of what was called the Truman Doctrine that was the official beginning of The Cold War. When peace was in the offing, in the Cuba Missile Crisis in high dudgeon Acheson retired to his farm to brood over his failure to get that war started. He did not return to any Ex Comm conferences.

It was the President who provided the restraint, supported by his brother and a few others on the Ex Comm. And it was the incompleteness of the rocket launchers in Cuba that provided the time.

Most of the books published later are in substantial agreement on the facts. The first accounts were in the Schlesinger book quoted above and in that of Theodore Sorensen, which also was published in 1965. In his Kennedy (Harper & Row, New York) Sorensen's first words, under a photograph of the President, are from John Buchan's Pilgrim's Way, on the death of Raymond S. Asquith,

He will stand to those of us who are left as an incarnation of the spirit of the land he loved.

Many of the letters to me reflect the sense of this quotation despite the efforts of the revisionists and the major attention given them by the media. Even a boy of 10 concluded the letter he wrote me in August, 1994 saying, "He left us something."

That "something" he left began with the admiration and respect he earned for his manly presidential acceptance of full responsibility for the tragic fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. Although he had, in fact, inherited that and his other major problem in Southeast Asia from the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower had not truthfully or fully informed him of the actualities of these two time-bombs that had been fused for him by the military. In each of these dangerous legacies his options were severely limited, and that, too, was intended for him.

On the Friday after the election he flew to his father's seaside estate in Florida for a few weeks of rest and recuperation from the strain of the campaign. While he was there CIA Director Allen Dulles briefed him on the Nixon-Eisenhower/Joint Chiefs of Staff/CIA proxy invasion of Cuba they had planned, staffed and trained. That briefing was far from complete. It put the best face on that ugly beast that, as we shall see and as Kennedy belatedly came to realize, had been put together to fail, with that failure intended to get us involved in a war in Cuba to get rid of Castro.

On Thursday, January 19, the day before his inauguration, with his secretaries of defense state and treasury he went to the White House for a final briefing. Of the trouble spots Eisenhower barely mentions Cuba. As O'Donnell reports it (page 276):

Eisenhower encouraged him to keep on supporting this plan to overthrow Castro. But Eisenhower talked mostly about Laos, which he regarded as the most dangerous spot in Southeast Asia. He mentioned South Vietnam only as one of the nations that would fall into the hands of the Communists if the United States failed to maintain the anti-Communist regime in Laos. Kennedy was astonished to hear Eisenhower telling him that American combat troops might have to fight alone in Laos if we could not persuade our allies to help us defend that government. Kennedy told us later, 'There he said, telling me to get ready to put ground forces in Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years. And he was very calm about it. I was finding out that things were really just as bad as I had said they were during the campaign.' (page 276)

O'Donnell does not report, here or elsewhere, when, if he did, Kennedy realized that he was to be the chief cop in the United States' policing of the world.

The successful attempt to control Kennedy and what he could and could not, would and would not do as President and as this chief cop of the world, began earlier. A CIA internal memo released in 1993 under the 1992 law that required but did not result in full disclosure of all records in any way related to the assassination (thoughtfully sent me by Anna Marie Kuhns Walko) spells this out. As disclosed the names of CIA employees and components are withheld, for all the world as though they are no well known to all the world's spookeries. The real and the obvious reason is to protect those who engaged in the gross improprieties reported,

that [name of the employee withheld] has established a new and (according to him) productive channel to President Elect Kennedy, through George Smathers. According to [employee name withheld], Smaters (sic) conversations with the President Elect have lead [name withheld] now to take the position that he should not go along with the Department of State and have the dictator step down. It appears that Mr. Kennedy may take a considerably more conservation position than many people in the Department in the 'fun house.'

The "fun house" is the CIA. What is meant by this "considerably more conservative position" on Castro may be ambiguous, but that is not true of that Kennedy "should not go along with the Department of State . . . not having the dictator step down." Because it is obvious that the Department did not want Castro to continue to rule Cuba the CIA is saying that we will get rid of him in the only other possible way, by throwing him out by war.

Good, clean fun in the "fun house"!

What "fun" that was when it happened and enjoyed the built-in failure that Kennedys later realized was part of the JCS/CIA-Eisenhower/Nixon devious plot he inherited.

O'Donnell describes as "one of his most courageous moments" when Kennedy decided when O'Donnell was among those with him in the White House the night he learned of the defeat and capture of the CIA's proxy army of invaders. He offers the not unbiased but not easily refuted opinion that:

Any other President of the United States, especially one who had been in office for only three months, might have tried to save himself from such a humiliation by sending Marines and jet fighters to beat back Castro's defending forces and to rescue the outnumbered invaders. Kennedy had made up his mind not to involve any American troops or combat planes . . . When the reports of failure came from the beachheads, he refused to give his military advisers, who had accepted his earlier order against any American participation in the invasion, but now argued that we had to change the plan and send American reinforcements to beat Castro and save the prestige of the Untied States, Kennedy firmly disagreed . . . I'll take the defeat,' he said that night to his generals and admirals, 'and I'll take all the blame for it.' (page 305)

Then they recall that the planning, under Dulles at the CIA and his deputy, Richard Bissell, was "with the knowledge and approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." (page 305)

The President told O'Donnell and the other with him that said night, "that the plan was so advanced when he came into office in January that it seemed almost impossible to cancel it. The brigade of fourteen hundred . . . were fully armed and ready to go into action. If we decided now to call the whole thing off, I don't know if we could go down there (to Guatemala) and take the guns away from them."

Kennedy was also under pressure from the President of Guatemala. he wanted those armed men out by the end of the month. There was also pressure from the report that the USSR was supplying Cuba with MIG jets the Cuban pilots for which had been trained in Czechoslovakia. The invasion then should be before the MIGs could be used against it. So, Kennedy agreed for the invasion,"with some reluctance," to be on Monday, April 17. But he did that only "after the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff accepted his strict restrictions that no American forces could take part in the invasion." (page 306) All the Joint Chiefs favored the invasion.

Four days before the invasion, O'Donnell says,

The President showed me a message that he had received that morning from a Marine Corps colonel who had just made an inspection of the Cuban Brigade at its camp in Guatemala. The message glowed with approval. The colonel was confident that the Cubans in the task force were highly capable of carrying out their combat mission and going from there to overthrow Castro. It was this impressive message from the colonel, Kennedy told me, that finally prompted him to go ahead. (page 307)

At his press conference following his acceptance of full responsibility Kennedy used a such-quoted sentence, saying that "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." In public he continued to assume full responsibility but

in private talks with a few of us . . . he pointed out the big flaws in the military plans for the operation. He wondered why the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA had expected the small landing force of fourteen hundred rebels to survive in Cuba without help and without help and reinforcements from one of only two possible sources -- either from inside the island, from internal uprisings, sabotage and armed attacks on the Cuban forces by underground revolutionists timed to coordinate with the landings, or from outside military support by American troops and air cover. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA agreed to the President's strict ruling against American military participation in the assault, he assumed that plans had been set for widespread uprising against the Castro government inside Cuba.

But when Kennedy began to get the details he "was shocked to discover that there had been no plans for a coordinated revolt in Cuba."

The CIA officers who were working in Guatemala with the leaders of the invasion force assured them that they would be getting strong American military support . . . The absence of any preparations for an organized uprising in Cuba, and the assurances of military support given to the rebels in the landing force, led President Kennedy to a bitter conclusion: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA must have been assuming all along that the President would become so worried at the last minute about the loss of his prestige that he would drop his restriction against the use of U.S. forces and send the Marines and the Navy jets into the action.

How else, the President asked us, could the Joint Chiefs approve such a plan? . . . 'They were sure I'd give them the go-ahead . . .' he said one day to Dave Powers, 'They couldn't believe that a new President like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.' (page 308-10)

This makes it clear that the military-industrial-intelligence complex had its own agenda, its own "national" policies and that they were the exact opposite of those of the President, the sole American with the Constitutional right and obligation to set national policy.

It is clear also that they had violated the strict orders of the President, the one and the only one with the Constitutional authority to give such orders -- the Constitution they had sworn to uphold.

They regarded the President as an obstruction, as an impediment in what they believed was the nation's need. Convinced of their omniscience, the Constitution itself was an impediment, an obstruction to them, so they violated it, knowingly, deliberately, they knowing better than what is set forth in our basic documents by our Founding Fathers and than the President elected to assume the right's, obligations and powers they arrogated to themselves.

Aside from the enormity of the subversion in all of this, that made us into a Gargantuan banana republic.

They wanted war, not peace, and if that required subversion, so be it, they engaged in this unprecedented subversion.

With their gang bang on the Constitution, their violations of our international obligations, including to the United Nations and to treaties were relatively minor in comparison. But only in comparison.

In this alone they made us into an international outlaw.

Despite the fact that neither the respected pundits, the sages in Congress nor the major media did inform the people about it.

The military had already begun that also under the Eisenhower administration on the other side of the world.

Chapter 4: The Cuba Missile Crisis Revisited

The military-industrial-intelligence complex neither learned from nor was content with its ignominious failure at the Bay of Pigs. It was determined to oust Castro because he was a dictator, not democratic. They did not have this attitude toward the oversupply of military dictators of the right some of whom they educated at military colleges and so many of whom they helped get there and virtually all of them they helped stay in power, regardless of their anti- democratic nature and the terror they visited upon their people. This was particularly true in that same part of the world, Latin America, especially in Central America.

These were more than acceptable to our military-industrial-intelligence complex, regardless of the deaths they caused. In Guatemala, where we overthrew the democratically- elected government and installed a brutal and murderous military dictatorship, the people killed there equal or exceed our deaths in Vietnam. And nobody talks about that. Or about the other tyrannies we installed or helped take over in other countries in that area.

The other side of that same coin is in our continuing efforts to throw Castro out, even by trying to kill him.

After John and Robert Kennedy were assassinated the story was put out that they were behind the attempts to assassinate Castro. Not only was there no evidence of this, the existing evidence is to the contrary.

The best-known of those failed plots to kill Castro was the CIA's dime-novel attempt to get the Mafia to do that for it. This led to one of the many popular theories of the JFK assassination, the "kickback" theory -- that Castro had JFK killed in retaliation. There was no major media debunking of this as what it was, irrational, as we saw above.

There came a time when the CIA was compelled to make an internal investigation of this Mafia-assassination scheme it had cooked up. It had given the impression that the Kennedys ordered it, knowing that it was false, as its records I have make absolutely beyond question. Its lie got extensive attention. The truth has yet to be reported. And I got it only by accident, the CIA having decided that it does not have to provide me with any information under FOIA when I am not in a position to contest that. The copy I have is from a Department of Justice file -- not its main assassination file.

It was Robert Kennedy who forced the CIA to check its files and report the results to him. On May 15, 1962 Lawrence R. Houston, CIA general counsel, forwarded the memo I cite to Robert in response to his request of four days earlier. Even the envelope was stamped TOP SECRET. IT held a May 14 memo by Shieffield Edwards, then the CIA's Director of Security. I t is of three single-spaced pages of which only two copies were made.

This loony assassination idea was that of Richard Bissell, the deputy security director, the Bissell of Bay of Pigs infamy. No higher authority that Edwards is cited as approving the project. The key sentence is,

Knowledge of this project during its life was kept to a total of six persons and never became a part of the project current at the time for the invasion of Cuba and there were no memoranda on the project nor were there any written documents or agreements. The project was orally approved by the said senior officials of the Agency.

All six were CIA officials.

Or, it was 100 percent "fun house stuff," with the fun enhanced by making the dead Kennedys responsible for it in the public and media mind knowingly false.

With this unsuccessful plot publicly exposed, what purpose was served classifying this memo Top Secret?

Only hiding the information in it from the public, to preserve the CIA lie of blaming the Kennedys for its own plot to assassinate Castro, one of a series of its failed, blundered and misbegotten attempts at what was once so anathema to all traditional American beliefs before there was this CIA.

How publicly was it known?

One of the Mafia kingpins it asked to get Castro killed, Chicago's Sam "Momo" Giancana, believed that a famous singer of the day, Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire sisters, was two-timing him with Dan Martin, of the Rowan and Martin Hollywood team. So, Giancana asked the CIA's honcho on the deal, Robert Maheau, then Howard Hughes' chief of security, to repay the favor by checking that report out. Maheau got a Miami wiretapping and bugging outfit to undertake the chore. Its operative, James Balletti, did so amateurish a job in Dan Martin's room the maid saw it. When Balletti was picked up and the sheriff was brought into it, the deal became public. I have a fat FBI file on it.

So, the CIA's improper use of this high classification on public information was for the exclusive purpose of hiding its exclusive responsibility behind the ever-available lie of protecting "national security."

What led to the Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962 is Castro's accurate information about plans for another invasion of Cuba. That it was accurate became apparent at what then was the most recent of the little-reported series of conferences between participants of both sides. That one, at the Cubans' invitation, was in Cuba. The transcripts have been published. They include Castro's extemporaneous accounting of some of those failed United States -- read CIA -- attempts to assassinate him. (Cuba on the Brink, New York, 1993, Pantheon, editors James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allen and David A. Welch.)

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was on the Ex Comm, acknowledged the correctness of Castro's citation of Operation Mongoose but said that the United States did not really intend to invade Cuba or to kill him.

Castro's espionage not extending to reading the United States Government mind, whether or not he would have trusted that reading, he reminded Khrushchev of his word that he would defend Cuba. The papers here did carry the notice that Raul Castro and Che Guevara had gone to Moscow to ask for help the middle of 1962.

There was no way in which the USSR could protect Cuba against any Untied States invasion. It could contribute to the slaughter of Cubans and slaughter invaders but Cuba would have been laid waste. This was a basis for my contemporaneous analysis that I had intended writing Tiger to Ride about. These conferences prove the essential correctness of my contemporaneous analysis. With no way to defend Cuba and with the reputation of the USSR and the value of its word at stake, Khrushchev did send missiles there but without giving authority to use them to those he sent to be in charge. As it turned out, whatever had been in anyone's mind, it was exactly as I had analyzed it, there were sent there not to be used but to be removed when the time came. No effort at real camouflage was made. They were not hidden from aerial cameras.

The official story is that those missiles were first photographed by a U-2 plane on Sunday, October 14, 1962, when the President was campaigning for New York Congressional candidates. Tuesday morning the sixteenth he was shown the enlargements of the pictures of the missile installations still under construction. the Ex Comm was put to deliberating what should be done. At the beginning of the O'Donnell account of those deliberations and the crisis that followed, there are these sentences that say much:

As late as the following Sunday, the day before the President appeared on television to announce the blockade and demand the removal of the missiles, he was still fighting opposition from Air Force leaders who were still urging an air strike. Undoubtedly, if the President had had to make a firm decision within twenty-four hours after the discovery of the missiles, he would have been under severe pressure to order a surprise attack on Cuba from the air, which would have had to be followed by an invasion. But the grace of a few more days that was given to him to consider other tactics allowed him time to work out the blockade plan, a strong and dramatic action against Khrushchev, but still a delaying move that enabled the Soviet leader to back away from the brink before the shots were fired. (page 355)

President Kennedy, well aware of the fact that if he made a single mistake the world could be involved in an immediate nuclear war, somehow resisted the simply enormous pressures on him to get that war started. These came largely but not entirely from his military advisers. Here are a few excerpts on this from his brother's book.

Although he made no reference to the United States military in the short introduction he wrote to Robert Kennedy's Thirteen Days, Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense and at least in theory boss of all the military, makes a strong condemnation in it of all the military in this praise of Robert Kennedy's strong opposition to what the military never stopped trying to get to do:

On the basic policy question of whether to force the missiles out by massive air and ground attack or by the far less risky application of a maritime quarantine, he strongly supported the quarantine.

He did so because he saw that the air and ground strikes favored by so many would have brought death to thousands of innocent Cuban civilians and to thousands of U.S. military personnel. He saw, too, that such attacks ran the risk of triggering the launch of nuclear weapons from Cuba against the U.S. and the risk of Soviet retaliatory attacks on Berlin or other vulnerable points on the periphery of NATO.

And he opposed a massive surprise attack by a large country on a small country because he believed such an attack to be inhuman, contrary to our traditions and ideals, and an act of brutality for which the world would never forgive us.

He understood then as now that above all else a U.S. President must, while defending our vital interests, prevent the confrontations between nuclear powers which can lead to nuclear holocaust.

His objective was to force the missiles out of Cuba without war. That objective was accomplished. (pages 14-15)

This is what Robert Kennedy says in Thirteen Days about the JCS demand for war:

The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimous in calling for immediate military action. They forcefully presented their view that the blockade would not be effective. General Curtis LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff, argued strongly with the President that a military attack was essential. When the President questioned what the response of the Russians might be, General LeMay assured him there would be no reaction. President Kennedy was skeptical. "They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can't, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don't take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin." (page 36)

While the JCS seem not to have discussed our casualties in the invasion, they never stopped urging and seem also not to have said that the Soviets would used their nuclear missiles, as Robert Kennedy said in Thirteen Days, the President reminded the Ex Comm of this:

The President turned to us all: "We are going to have to face the fact that, if we do invade, by the time we get to these sites, after a very bloody fight, they will be pointed at us. And we must further accept the possibility that when military hostilities first begin, those missiles will be fired."

John McCone said everyone should understand that an invasion was going to be a much more serious undertaking than most people had previously realized. "They have a hell of a lot of equipment," he said. And it will be damn tough to shoot them out of those hills, as we learned so clearly in Korea. (pages 85-6)

McCone was the CIA director.

It seems incredible that one man, under all that unprecedented pressure from a nuclear- threatening situation, with the added great pressure of his own military unable to restrain its insistence on starting a war, could think of so much, including what in accord with his orders the military should have thought or did not or deliberately did the opposite. When he learned that we had a spy ship "very close to the coast of Cuba," as Robert Kennedy put it in Thirteen Days, "he ordered if further out to sea, where it would be less vulnerable to attack." (page 86)

Or can that be why it was "very close to the coast of Cuba" to entice an attack that would start the shooting war our military wanted?

In the opinion of one of the JCS at least there is never any barrier to a nuclear first-strike that is not legitimate, including in particular one by the then USSR against us. As Robert Kennedy said in Thirteen Days,

One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, argued that we could use nuclear weapons, on the basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack. I thought, as I listened, of the many times that I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.

The President made his decision that afternoon in favor of the blockade. (page 48)

This was at that Saturday afternoon meeting. It was not this so Nazi-like JCS interpretation of what is right and what is wrong that made the President's mind up for him. He had made it up before then.

With this kind of thinking there is nothing military that is not perfectly alright if somebody wants to do it, according to our own Chiefs of Staff.

This is what Robert Kennedy said about the JCS and what they would have begun with:

Later, Secretary McNamara, although he told the President he disagreed with the Joint Chiefs and favored a blockade rather than an attack, informed him that the necessary planes, men, and ammunition were being deployed and that we would be ready to move with the necessary air bombardments on Tuesday, October 23, if that was to be the decision. The plans called for an initial attack, consisting of five hundred sorties, striking all military targets, including the missile sites, airfields, ports, and gun emplacements. (page 37)

But that was only the beginning. When the President went to the nation,

In his speech, he emphasized that the blockade was the initial step. He had ordered the Pentagon to make all the preparations necessary for further military action. Secretary McNamara, in a confidential report, had listed the requirements: 250,000 men, 2,000 air sorties against the various targets in Cuba, and 90,000 Marines and Airborne in the invasion force. One estimate of American casualties put the expected figure over 25,000. The President gave his approval for these preparations. (page 55)

This assumes that the Russians under attack would not have used their tactical small nuclear weapons with which they were armed and that we also would not use ours. Perhaps McNamara did not know then that the Russian forces were so armed. But he did learn it at the Havana conference the transcript of which are verbatim in Cuba on the Brink and the possibilities disturbed him greatly even 30 years later.

The President was patient with those he consulted in the Congress just before he spoke to the nation. As Robert Kennedy says in Thirteen Days,

The President, after listening to the frequently emotional criticism, explained that he would take whatever steps were necessary to protect the security of the United States, but that he did not feel greater military action was warranted initially. Because it was possible that the matter could be resolved without a devastating war, he had decided on the course he had outlined. Perhaps in the end, he said, direct military action would be necessary, but that course should not be followed lightly. In the meantime, he assured them, he had taken measures to prepare our military forces and place them in a position to move.

He reminded them that once an attack began our adversaries could respond with a missile barrage from which many millions of Americans would be killed. That was a gamble he was not willing to take until he had finally and forcefully exhausted all other possibilities. He told them this was an extremely hazardous undertaking and that everyone should understand the risks involved. (pages 54-5)

If the Air Force had gotten its way, World War III was close to inevitable and what was resolved peacefully would at the very least have resulted in terrible losses of lives and what else can hardly be imagined.

There used to be a TV show, Have Gun, Will Travel. With the Air Force it would be "Have Bombs, Let's Drop Them."

Within the Ex Comm Robert Kennedy was part of a small minority that wanted to avoid starting a war. He recommended a blockade that would be called a "quarantine" because a blockade is an act of war. In arguing with Dean Acheson Robert said with some vehemence "We are not going to make my brother the Tojo of the 1960s," referring to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. (pages 359-60)

Among the President's reasons for opposing an air strike is the fact that it would not destroy all the missile bases and if nothing else the killing of the Russians at those sites would almost certainly start a war. Then we would have had to follow up with what he did not want, an invasion of Cuba. He preferred the "quarantine" because that gave Khrushchev an out.

General Curtis LeMay was then the Air Force Chief of Staff. He never stopped arguing with great vehemence for an air strike and he wanted that pronto. The President was at that Thursday's Ex Comm meeting. He asked LeMay, "How will the Russians respond?"

They would not do a thing was LeMay's reply that astounded the President.

"Is that what you really think?" he asked LeMay. "Are you telling me that they'll let us bomb their missiles and kill a lot of Russians and then do nothing? If they don't do anything in Cuba they'll certainly do something in Berlin."

(Reeves gives a virtually identical account on pages 378-9)

O'Donnell says that "After the meeting the President said to me, 'Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong." (page 36, again confirmed by Reeves)

The President had made his mind up. He told O'Donnell that the "quarantine" had the advantages of being a strong opening move by the United States that had the least possibility of starting a shooting war, but he wanted a majority of the Ex Comm to agree. When O'Donnell asked him, "What if you cannot get a consensus" from the Ex Comm the President replied, "I'll make my decision anyway. I'm the one who has the responsibility, so we'll do what I want to do." O'Donnell then writes, "He told me a story about Abraham Lincoln at his cabinet meeting saying 'All in favor vote "aye." The whole cabinet voted aye. Lincoln voted no, and then announced that the no's had it.'" (page 362)

In an effort to make things appear to be normal Kennedy continued his public political activities with his appearances around the country. When they were in Chicago, Pierre Salinger, who was, like most of the White House staff, out of the loop and unaware of what was going on, told the President "that Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott were coming out with a story in their column about an invasion of Cuba, and Carleton Kent of the Chicago Sun-Times was asking about a report that a parachute unit had been alerted for a jump on Cuba." O'Donnell writes that up until then "the security cover on the missile crisis had been amazingly tight . . . We had to keep Salinger in the dark, but it became obvious in Chicago that we would not be able to keep him there much longer. I could see that the President was silently cursing the Joint Chiefs of Staff." Who almost alone had any interest in such leaks. (page 363)

Kennedy had O'Donnell call Kent and tell him "that report is all wrong" and he had McNamara ask Allen and Scott not to print their column.

The lid was on a little longer, but "Security was beginning to fall apart" and "there was still considerable opposition among the military people to the blockade." (page 364)

"That Saturday afternoon," the end of the week before Kennedy did go public, "we had a meeting of the Ex Comm . . .where the President announced his decision to put the blockade into effect during the following week . . . ." (page 365)

One of the continuing problems raised at that meeting was that we had missiles in Turkey, so how would we react to the Soviet complaint that they were doing only what we had been doing on their border for years? O'Donnell write that "President Kennedy had asked repeatedly over the past year to have 'those Jupiter missiles removed from Turkey. "I wouldn't mind so much if the damned things were serving any useful purpose. They should have been taken out of there back in the Eisenhower administration." (page 367)

Time of secrecy was running out rapidly. When Adlai Stevenson reported that both the New York Times and the Washington Post had learned about the crisis, JFK himself phoned both papers asking them to hold off until Monday night, when he would be speaking. Sunday, O'Donnell writes, Kennedy gave the Air Force generals one last chance to argue for an immediate bombing of the missile sites. He again ruled against an air strike when General Walter C. Sweeney, commander of the Tactical Air Force, admitted that it would be impossible to take out all the missile sites in one blow. It had to be all or nothing, the President said, because we had no way of knowing which sites, if any, were operational . . . We might miss or overlook a few operational sites, which could immediately open fire on the United States." (page 370)

This is to say that the Air Force, fully aware of the fact that it could lead to nuclear bombs being fired at this country from only 90 miles away could be the immediate response to their insistence upon an air strike on those missile sites nonetheless were determined to bomb these missile sites, considering no other alternative. Without regard to its causing nuclear bombs to his us!

After reporting the extent of the United States nuclear alert for the previous week O'Donnell writes that when the "quarantine" was put into effect, "If shooting started at the blockade line, a nuclear war could quickly follow." (page 376) As of that time they had received two reports of Soviet ships being conducted by submarines. When the President asked, "What do we do now?" McNamara, secretary of defense, replied that our carrier Essex, which was nearby "would send a sonar signal to the submarine, ordering it to come to the surface and identify itself. If the submarine refused to surface and stop, a small explosive would be dropped by a helicopter from the Essex."

While they were horrified that nuclear war could be so close, "a messenger came into the room and handed a note to (CIA director), John McCone, who read it quickly and said, "Mr. President, we have a preliminary report which indicates that some of the Russian ships are stopping." The preliminary reported was then verified, and a Naval Intelligence officer came to the meeting with a full report that twenty Russian ships had come to a stop before reaching the blockade line, (which Kennedy had announced in his Monday night speech). Some of them were standing still in the water and others had turned around and were heading back toward Europe. Dean Rusk, who was sitting beside the President, said quietly, "We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." (page 376-7)

The military and its Ex Comm allies, a majority at the beginning of that harrowing week that could have ended with the world aflame, were wrong and the President and his brother with the few others of the Ex Comm minority were right. They had both avoided nuclear war and laid the basis for resolving the crisis peacefully. But that did not satisfy the military. It lusted for war without regard for the consequences more horrible than anything in human history, devastation that could make the terrible atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like minor disturbances:

We heard later that several high-ranking Naval officers in the Pentagon were bitterly disappointed when the Soviet vessels failed to make a run though the blockade. They had been looking forward eagerly to sinking or capturing a few Russian submarines. One prominent officer of Irish-American ancestry was so disgusted when he heard that the Soviet ships were stopping and turning around that he shattered the quite decorum of the Navy's plotting room by uttering a loud four-letter obscenity. Well aware that the Navy would have liked to rub it in, President Kennedy immediately sent strict orders to the Essex and to Admiral George W. Anderson, the Navy's gung-ho chief of operations, that none of the Soviet ships and submarines outside of the blockade interception zone were to be stopped, boarded or harassed in any way. The President assumed that Khrushchev was probably already taking enough criticism from his rivals in the Kremlin, and he wanted no incident that might cause a new flare-up. (page 377)

The Navy was not content. The President, the highest authority in the nation, its commander in chief, had given orders, but the Navy had its own ideas:

That night McNamara, with his deputy secretary, Roswell Gilpatric, visited the Navy's Flag Plot, or command center in the Pentagon, where the blockade operation was being directed, to make sure that the President's orders were being observed. He found Admiral Anderson himself in the room, watching a single American vessel that was shown on the plotting board to be standing alone far outside of the interception zone. McNamara asked what the ship was doing out there. Anderson explained that it was watching a Soviet submarine.

The Secretary of Defense pointed out to the admiral that the President was anxious not to bother any Soviet ships needlessly, that the Russians must be allowed to retreat or to stand outside the blockade zone with no humiliation. Anderson informed the Secretary that the Navy needed no advice on how to manage a blockade, and suggested that the Secretary could leave the room. A few months later Anderson retired from the Navy, at President Kennedy's suggestion, to become our Ambassador to Portugal. (page 378)

That a career Navy man of this highest rank did not regard himself or the Navy as under civilian control and said so reflects the long-time attitude of some in the military.

At a time I do not remember precisely, after World War I and before World War II, when the Army started printing small, pocket-size handbooks for enlisted men, it published and distributed one that denounced democracy. In about 1940 I had a copy of it. It was, I emphasize, an official Army publication written and distributed to tell enlisted men what the Army wanted them to know.

"Democracy is mobocracy" are the exact words I remember after all these years.

The basis for this was a pretended difference between what that handbook correctly stated, that our country is a republic and not a democracy. A republic is a democratic form of government, which that handbook could hardly have said and still denounced democracy.

The Oxford American dictionary defines "republic" in these words:

"A country in which the supreme power is held by the people or their elected representatives, or by an elected or nominated president."

It defines democracy as

"1.a government by the whole of the people of a country, especially through their representatives, whom they elect. 2. a country governed this way."

Each definition says the same thing, that the government is of the people, the "mob" to the military minds who created, approved and distributed this anti-American denunciation of their own government and form of government to the troops under them.

This is the attitude and belief Admiral Anderson reflected and expressed to McNamara, who was literally his boss, when McNamara reminded Anderson that he and the Navy were in deliberate violation of the explicit orders of the President, their commander in chief.

It is both the attitude and the record of the military high command under Kennedy, as we have seen, of the Lemays, the Lemnitzers and those others who considered their duty in the republic of that Army handbook to do the exact opposite of what the highest authority in the land ordered and made clear he wanted. It is the attitude that the "supreme power" belongs to them, not the President.

Then the well-reported but perhaps also by some well forgotten and by others not even known groping for a settlement began. First Khrushchev, going outside his diplomatic channels, sent a personal message to the President. He followed that with a personal letter. He would remove his missiles if the United States would promise not to invade Cuba. When he did not get a prompt reply to that he sent a stronger proposal publicly, that he knew Kennedy could not accept, if we removed our missiles from his border, those in Turkey, he would take his back from Cuba. Of the letter, O'Donnell writes:

It was obvious that Khrushchev had written this letter himself, probably without consulting anybody in the Kremlin, and that he intended it to be received, like his previous personal letters to Kennedy, as a man-to-man expression of his feelings rather than as an official communication. The letter was never made public in the Soviet Union and, out of respect for Khrushchev, Kennedy did not allow it to be published in n the United States, although some brief excerpts and paraphrases of certain passages did appearing after the President's death. When the President showed me the letter that Friday night after he read it for the first of many times, I was deeply moved by Khrushchev's anguished fear that he had provoked Kennedy into a fighting mood and a readiness for war. He pleaded with Kennedy not to lose his "self-control" and begged him not to let "the two of us pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied . . .Let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this." (page 380)

Khrushchev's second proposal "was stern and demanding," O'Donnell says, it "amounted to a blackmailing trade instead of the reasonable exchange of the peaceful guarantee that Khrushchev had asked in this first letter" to which there had been no response. (page 381) Writing of the President's reaction, O'Donnell says:

I found him not so much upset by Khrushchev's change in attitude as exasperated because the Jupiter missiles were still in Turkey, where the Russians could use them in a face-saving barter, several months after their removal had been ordered by the President. "Just to set the record straight," the President said to me, "will you find out when was the last time I asked to have those damned missiles taken out of Turkey? Not the last five times I asked for their removal, just the date of the last time." I went to my office and called Bromley Smith in Bundy's office and asked him to check the file. Sure enough, the President had ordered the removal of the Jupiter missiles in August, two months before the Soviet ballistic missile sites were discovered in Cuba. (page 382)

The military with its own agenda again. Who the hell does the President think he is, anyway?

In Thirteen Days Robert Kennedy writes that after receipt of Khrushchev's second letter the Ex Comm believed there was confusion within the USSR, perhaps even that Khrushchev had been overthrown, without President Kennedy realizing it. Robert Kennedy also wrote about the confusion in which he was involved:

The change in the language and tenor of the letters from Khrushchev indicated confusion within the Soviet Union; but there was confusion among us as well. At that moment, not knowing exactly what to suggest, some recommended writing to Khrushchev and asking him to clarify his two letters. There was no clear course of action. Yet we realized that, as we sat there, the work was proceeding on the missile sites in Cuba, and we now had the additional consideration that if we destroyed these sites and began an invasion, the door was clearly open for the Soviet Union to take reciprocal action against Turkey.

The NATA countries were supporting our position and recommending that the U.S. be firm; but, President Kennedy said, they did not realize the full implications for them. If we carried out an air strike against Cuba and the Soviet Union answered by attacking Turkey, all NATO was going to be involved. Then, immediately, the President would have to decide whether he would use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union, and all mankind would be threatened.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff joined the meeting and recommended their solution. It had the attraction of being a very simple next step -- an air strike on Monday, followed shortly afterward by an invasion. (page 96)

This was just before Robert Kennedy came up with the simple solution of accepting Khrushchev's first offer and ignoring his second one. It was also the very day that our U-2 was shot down. Writing of that, Robert said, and without indicating whether or not this realization controlled what we did or inspired it, "There was the realization that the Soviet Union and Cuba apparently were preparing to do battle. And there was the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, the Americans, too, and that bridges to escape were crumbling." (page 97) Then, and this is next to the last page of the next of the book he never finished,

"How can we send any more U-2 pilots into this area tomorrow unless we take out all of the SAM sites?" the President asked. "We are now in an entirely new ball game."

At first, there was almost unanimous agreement that we had to attack early the next morning with bombers and fighters and destroy the SAM sites. But again the President pulled everyone back. "It isn't the first step that concerns me," he said, "but both sides escalating to the fourth and fifth step -- and we don't go to the sixth because there is no one around to do so. We must remind ourselves we are embarking on a very hazardous course." (page 98)

When "there is no one around" it is because all have been incinerated in the nuclear holocaust the military never mentioned except to deny there would be one.

While the Ex Comm was deliberating they got the report of a U-2 plane flying into Siberia. It had been intercepted by Soviet fighter planes but not shot down. This had happened despite the fact that "The President had expressly banned" such flights, for air testing, during the crisis. It was then that Robert Kennedy "suggested ignoring the second Khrushchev letter . . . and writing instead a reply to Khrushchev's first private letter . . . The President immediately agreed to the idea and sent Bobby and Ted Sorensen into another room to work on such a reply." (page 385)

Still again, by refusing to follow the commander in chief's orders, the military had almost engulfed the world in nuclear war.

When Khrushchev accepted the response prepared by Robert Kennedy and Sorensen the crisis was over. Mankind was saved from the greatest of nuclear disasters. But the military still was not content that the resolution was entirely peaceful. As O'Donnell reports, "We learned later that one of our military leaders said, when hearing about Khrushchev's willingness to remove the missiles, 'Does this mean our air strike has to be called off? Whey can't we attack on Tuesday anyway?" (page 387)

Here victory, saving the world from a nuclear holocaust, did not satisfy the military. As Reeves reports,

"May I congratulate you on your leadership, firmness and judgment over the past tough week," Dean Acheson wrote to the President. "We have not had these qualities at the helm in this country at all times. It is good to have them again . . ."

In the privacy of his own home, though, the former Secretary of State was calling the strategy a reckless gamble. "Plain dumb luck," he said of Kennedy's triumph.

A few days later, President Kennedy invited the Joint Chiefs of Staff over to his office to thank them personally for their role in the crisis. General Curtis LeMay looked at his Commander-in-Chief and said there was no reason for thanks. "We lost! We ought to just go in there today and knock 'em off!" (page 425)

To LeMay, victory at the cost of a possible nuclear war was a defeat. As he said, "We lost!"

Not the country.

Not the world either.

Only war lost. Peace won.

Thirty-two years after this missile crisis what I say about Kennedy, his understanding of the situation, how dire it was, how it was best dealt with, and how, despite the unprecedented nature of that crisis, he kept control of himself, and those around him and how he prevented that greatest of world tragedies, was confirmed with the unexpected release of a contemporaneous record.

That from his first knowledge of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and throughout the crisis Kennedy was well aware of the alternatives and the terrible potential and through it all was "cool" is the interpretation of The New York Daily News in its July 28, 1994 story on the disclosure of a short tape made during "The crucial hours" early in that crisis.

This tape was made "only hours before Kennedy's dramatic announcement to Americans that missiles had been placed in Cuba and aimed at U.S. targets" on October 22, Bill Bell wrote.

He quotes Sheldon Stern, archivist at the John F. Kennedy Library as stating of the tape, "There is absolutely no Cold War rhetoric. The discussion is calm, unemotional, rational and businesslike." The alternatives discussed, quoting Stern, were "bombing the missile sites, pressuring the Soviet Union to remove them, or, in effect striking a deal with Moscow to remove them in return for some U.S. gesture."

In Bell's opinion, "the most striking sentence" is Kennedy's intent, "'The question really is," said Kennedy, 'what action do you take which lessens the chance of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure?'"

Bell's list of those who participated in this discussion does not include a single officer of any military service. Which may account for the absence of "any Cold War rhetoric" and calm discussion in which the alternatives were clearly stated, including the ultimate solution. That Kennedy regarded what the military was pressuring him for, a "nuclear exchange," as "the final failure", reflect what he was determined to avoid.

Despite the intense military pressure on him for it to happen.

With the secrecy that has become a national way of our political life often what should be known so decision-makers and the people can understand and profit from it is not available, having been kept secret for no apparent legitimate reason and certainly from no "national security" need but contrary to that need. There can be little information more important in the modern world, in the era of nuclear destruction that can be beyond the wildest imagining. That what realities to war and to decisions about going to war.

That there was, as we have seen, enormous pressure from the military for JFK to attack Cuba at the time of the 1962 missile crisis. Some of it is indicated above. But that there was also intense political pressure for him to take us into the war that would have meant some simply enormous and unprecedented destruction is much less known. While some of this great pressure on JFK was from political friends of the military, some was not and was from those important in our political life.

On December 21, 1994 the Associated Press carried a story I did not see reported on TV or heard reported on radio news. The edition of the Washington Post that reaches Frederick did not carry it. It was in our local Post the next morning. Oddly for a newspaper story the source is not indicated. I presume the source was the Kennedy library, part of The National Archives. Our local paper ran the story across the top of the second page of its news section, with this headline: "Hill leaders urged JFK to invade in Cuba missile crisis."

BOSTON (AP) -- Congressional leaders privately urged President Kennedy to invade Cuba at the outset of the Cuban missile crisis, newly released White House tapes show.

"We've got to take a chance somewhere, sometime, if we're going to retain our position as a great world power," Sen. Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, advised Kennedy as the world came to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.

Kennedy deflected the Georgia Democrat by reassuring him that troops were being massed for an invasion but would not be ready for at least a week.

Minutes later, the president went on television to announce a different tactic: a blockade against ships bound for Cuba with offensive weapons.

The president had learned only hours earlier that a U.S. air strike would be less than 100 percent effective against the missiles and that a ground invasion could take months.

Four days later, on Oct. 26 -- after the United States had secretly pledged to remove NATO missiles in Turkey -- the Soviets agreed to remove any offensive weapons in Cuba, and the crisis was defused.

The tapes, released Wednesday after being kept secret for more than 32 years, cover two meetings held Oct. 22, 1962, about a week after aerial reconnaissance photos first revealed a Soviet medium-range missile site under construction in Cuba.

More than 500 tactical fighter planes already were massed in Florida by Oct. 22, and tracking stations were being turned around to spy on Cuba.

Kennedy had learned in a separate meeting with his National Security Council earlier the same day that some Cuban missiles could survive a U.S. air strike and be used against American targets.

"It looked like we would have all the difficulties of Pearl Harbor and not finish the job," he said.

Kennedy shared this news with Russell and other congressional committee chairmen hours later. They insisted it was time to fight.

"Seem to me, we're either a first-class power or we're not," said Russell, a Navy veteran and two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. "You have warned these people . . . they can't say they're not on notice. If we temporize in this situation, I don't see how we can ever hope to find a place where we are in complete justification."

Kennedy deferred to his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who said a quarantine might also satisfy the senator's demand for military confrontation.

"This operation obviously is going to lead to the application of military force," McNamara said. "It's entirely possible that the first Soviet ship hailed will attempt to penetrate the quarantine."

But Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called a quarantine the worst of all possible actions, because "an attack on a Russian ship is really an act of war against Russian. It is not an act of war against Russia to attack Cuba."

Fulbright advocated "an invasion, and an all-out one, as quickly as possible."

Kennedy argued that the Soviets would not stand by as an American invasion force was built up with designs on Cuba. Besides, McNamara said, there were at least 8,000 Soviet military advisers there.

"We can't invade Cuba," Kennedy said. "It takes us some while to assemble our force to invade Cuba. That's one of the problems we've got."

Russell is an excellent illustration of how the military buys political support with the tax money, the peoples' money it spends. On the armed-forces committee before he became its chairman he was important to the military and the military spent vast sums in Georgia. That was politically important to Russell, as it was also for the military. It was only natural that Russell's view was usually that of the military and it was only natural for the military to look out for Russell's political interest and for him to come to think sometimes as the military did.

Fulbright, however, was for that era a dove, not a hawk, yet his was the hawkish position of the military in that crisis, as were many others on the Hill then.

These tapes that had been kept secret for so long confirm the statements of those above- quoted participants, that JFK had an understanding most of his advisers if not all or all but his brother did not have. His was the best and correct judgement as in theory if rarely in practice presidents are supposed to possess and express.

The pressures on him to make the wrong decision were enormous. For years he was berated by his political enemies and after he was dead by those of opposite political view for allegedly making the wrong decision. Under Ronald Reagan, who was the opposite kind of President, strong efforts were made to nullify the agreement Kennedy made with Khrushchev. These pressures then extended to what would have meant war. Fortunately they did not succeed. But the political perspective from which they came persisted and continues to persist, with the potential for war continuing to exist, too.

But these tapes so long secret and covering only part of that crisis period, do confirm that JFK had the best understanding of the realities, that he was able to resist those enormous pressures for war, and that his was the correct judgement.

For us and for the world.

These tapes also reveal that the military was wrong along with the most influential of our political leaders.

That the major media gave this story less attention than justified reflects the continuing failure of the major media to give the information the people require for our system of representative society to work.

Planing this story down is consistent with the revisionism that has set in. This story reflects favorably on JFK and on his judgement and his exceptional ability to somehow maintain control over the situation that made unprecedented war almost inevitable. This story presents him as a great and exceptional leader who in the time of that unprecedented crisis made the correct decisions against overwhelming odds.

There was a time when the media revelled in reporting what confirmed the strengths of our system of government and the accomplishments of presidents.

That is not its record with JFK. Nor is it the record of the major book publishers or of the TV specials.

The country and the world will suffer if there is again such a crisis and those who face it can not benefit from full understanding and appreciation of the truly exceptional leadership and judgement JFK then displayed and the courage necessary to make the decision that saved the country and the world planned and pushed with vigor by the military.

Chapter 5: "And We Call Ourselves The Human Race"

What is truly amazing and I believe was of simply enormous significance that is not mentioned at all by O'Donnell and is mentioned frequently by Robert Kennedy without an effort to give it any meaning -- really presented as though it had no meaning -- is that although the USSR crews in Cuba were well aware of United States overflights, they permitted them to continue throughout the crisis.

That the Cuban anti-aircraft crews also made no effort to shoot any of ours down is in a sense of even more significance because those overflights, each and every one of the many of them, was an act of war against Cuba.

Among Robert Kennedy's references to them is that the "photography taken on Wednesday, the 17th of October, showed several other installations with at least sixteen and possibly thirty-two missiles of over a thousand-mile range." (page 35) "Other" referred to those depicted in earlier aerial photographs.

He wrote of the Tuesday of the following week that "The U-2s and low-flying planes had returned the previous day with their film, and throughout the evening it was analyzed -- by now in such volume that the film alone was more than twenty-five miles long." (page 68)

As his account of the crisis continues, "On the night of Thursday, October 25, our aerial photography revealed that work on the missile sites was proceeding at an extraordinarily rapid pace. By the following evening, October 26, it was clear that the IL-28 bombers were also being rapidly uncrated and assembled." (page 77)

While these are not all his references to the entirely unimpeded overflights they leave it without question that neither the USSR nor the Cubans, each of whom could have, had any interest in discouraging or preventing the photographs of what was going on. This leads to the believe that they wanted the United States to know. And that cannot be without meaning.

My belief is that it confirms my contemporaneous analysis for Tiger to Ride, that Khrushchev needed Kennedy to know for Kennedy to have his own "tiger to ride," the decision on whether there would be war or peace, peace meaning a peaceful settlement of the problem. Khrushchev could not survive without settlement of it.

As Robert Kennedy wrote in Thirteen Days about the beginning of the second week of the crisis,

John McCone reported to our committee that as yet there had been no general alert of the Soviet forces in Cuba or around the globe. No extraordinary military action of any kind had been reported. In Cuba, the Russians were not permitting anyone other than Russian technical and military personnel to enter the missile bases. He also reported that they were beginning to camouflage the missile sites. It was never clear why they waited until that late date to do so. (page 53)

And this, it should be remembered, was several years after the Russians had the radar and the weaponry to shoot down that Gary Powers U-2 flight our government believed was flying so high over the USSR they did not have that capability.

If they had been ordered to try to hide what they were doing, the Russian technical people would have made that effort. If they had been ordered to destroy any intruding United States aircraft, they would have done that, too.

As they did when it served their purposes.

All those many flights, the U-2s up high and the other planes much lower, continued without any molestation, with not even a threat, until it served Khrushchev's interest to force the issue, to get Kennedy to reach his decision after almost two weeks of indecision.

Air Force U-2 pilot Rudolf Anderson was shot down the morning of Saturday, October 27.

That was the day after Khrushchev's first proposal was given to the United States, first in a hurry informally. Khrushchev had Aleksander Fomin of the embassy, a man reputed to be the USSR's chief spook in Washington, give it verbally to then ABC News correspondent John Scali. That evening the actual Khrushchev letter was handed to the President. That was his offer to remove his missiles from Cuba in return for the United States promise not to invade Cuba.

Khrushchev had neither a response nor any indication that he would be getting one -- as he didn't until he raised the stakes again with the public proposal he knew would not be acceptable, to remove his missiles if we took ours out of Turkey where they were on his border.

Khrushchev had reason to interpret no retaliation for shooting Anderson down to mean that Kennedy did not want war.

Where the USSR had even more reason for shooting a U-2 down, when one crossed into its own territory in Siberia, he had it let alone by his fighter planes that escorted it out of the USSR's air space. Had Khrushchev wanted war or had he wanted to be just a real tough guy he could and would have shot down the U-2 that transgressed his borders. That was a signal to Kennedy that Khrushchev did not want to escalate the crisis and that meant he wanted a peaceful agreement. That he had the Anderson U-2 shot down the day after Kennedy had his proposal was still another signal to Kennedy, to get him going, to make his decision quickly. Which is what happened.

Despite the persistent vigorous efforts of our military history's most terrible war was averted and detente was begun, Kennedy's public efforts to get the people behind peace and detente were enunciated in his speech at Washington's American University in June of 1963. O'Donnell writes:

Kennedy referred to the American University address as "the peace speech," because it was an appeal for a lasting peace between the United States and the Soviet Union, directed at Khrushchev, who had hinted that such a new message from the President might help to bring a favorable reaction to Kennedy's proposal for a nuclear atmospheric test ban treaty.

"It is an ironic but accurate fact," President Kennedy said in his appeal to the Russians, "that the two strongest powers are the two in most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours. For we are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons . . . If we cannot now end our differences, we can at least make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

The American University speech brought an immediate thaw in our relationship with the Soviets. (page 406-7)

There is nothing the military did or said during this crisis that reflects any real appreciation of and concern for the fact "that the two strongest powers are the two most in danger of devastation."

And aside from having its own policy contrary to the stated policy of the nation, as stated by its President, it also violated his orders, those of its commander in chief, in that also risking a nuclear holocaust.

Despite which he preserved the peace.

In this part of the world, anyway.

He never knew how much more difficult this had been made for him by the military and the CIA. How much more dangerous the military and the CIA made what could have led to the greatest disaster in the history of the world.

As I wrote earlier in reporting that the perceptive and experienced British reporter Steve Barber had missed the significance of what he had read in Schlesinger's book, that our military planned to get us into a land war with China, there is much too much for the best reporters not to miss something from time to time. But then all reporters, columnists, editorial writers and those contributing articles for use on oped pages also missed it.

This is also true of what, while not definitive, is more than merely reason to suspect that the military had reasons to believe much earlier that the USSR had missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads for a thousand miles or so in Cuba.

In all I have read, I recall no reference at any point by anyone reflecting that the President was given the information that follows. There is every reason to believe that the military kept it secret from him -- from the President, from their commander-in-chief.

But then the experienced reporter, the man who became head of the most prestigious school of journalism we have, at Columbia University, also did not spell it out in his book. As the dust jacket of his book says about him,

Elie Abel, a seasoned foreign correspondent, is known across the country for his special reports and analysis on NBC television. Before joining the National Broadcasting Company in 1961, he served ten years with The New York Times at home and overseas, covering the Defense and State Departments, summit conferences, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Tibetan uprising of 1959. Abel also put in two years as Washington bureau chief of The Detroit News.

In 1965, he became chief of the NBC News bureau in London.

His book is The Missile Crisis, published in 1965 by J. B. Lippincott. (New York 1966) Early in his book, this is what Abel says:

Colonel John Ralph Wright, Jr., of the Defense Intelligence Agency had studied the results of the September overflights with meticulous care. He was struck by the placement of SAMs, in an oddly trapezoidal pattern, near the Cuban town of San Cristóbal. This configuration roused Colonel Wright's suspicion. It resembled the placement of missile installations photographed repeatedly by pilots like Gary Powers over the Soviet Union. The colonel suggested to his boss, General Joseph Carroll, that San Cristóbal might be worth a closer look. Thus a look at San Cristóbal became part of the flight plan for the next U-2 sortie. (page 26)

Three pages later Abel has this footnote:

*In June 1963, Colonel Wright's crucial contribution was acknowledged with the award of an Oak Leaf Cluster to the Legion of Merit he had received ten years earlier. The citation reads, in part: "He performed a unique service to his country by single-handedly analyzing a series of intelligence reports concerning the activities of the Soviet Union in Cuba and, by this analysis, pinpointing the location of the first medium-range ballistic missiles deployed by the USSR in the Western hemisphere. His analysis led him to recommend for immediate coverage by high- altitude reconnaissance aircraft the exact location which was photographed on 14th October, 1962, and revealed the existence of those missiles in Cuba."

What "struck" Wright is that the pattern of SAMs photographed in Cuba was known to have only a single purpose, to protect Soviet "missile installations."

This had only two possible meanings, that there were Soviet missiles there capable of raining nuclear destruction on much of the eastern half of the United States or there soon would be.

And the President was not told of it!

It was kept secret from him and from all that has been reported by and from the Ex Comm, from every member of it other than from the military, who said not a word about it. And that Ex Comm was composed of the most important people in our government making the most important recommendations of their lives.

Not only was this kept secret, this positive proof that there were or there soon would be those Soviet missiles capable of carrying nuclear bombs over the United States -- nothing was done to immediately obtain proof that the missiles were there. What was much more important was bureaucratic in-fighting between the Air Force and the CIA. And then the weather turned bad. Here is how Abel continues (pages 26-7):

There was more delay due to cloud over the target area. The U-2 loses effectiveness when the sky is 25 percent or more overcast. In addition, a day or two was lost while new Strategic Air Command pilots were checked out on U-2s built to CIA specifications. McNamara had suggested the shift to McCone in view of the greatly accelerated flight schedule. There was for the first time real danger of losing planes as well as pilots. In that situation, McNamara urged, Air Force regulars ought to take over. Some CIA people took this hard. General Carter, in McCone's month-long absence, had appealed to the White House, arguing that intelligence was properly the CIA's business and that it had its own control center to go with the planes, the trained pilots, and the experience. McGeorge Bundy dismissed the appeal.

By October 14, the skies over Cuba had cleared, the CIA had choked down its bitter pill and two Air Force pilots, thoroughly familiar by now with the CIA version of the U-2, had climbed into their borrowed flying machines. Both were Air Force majors -- Rudolf Anderson, Jr., of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Richard S. Heyser of Battle Creek, Michigan. Both had been born in 1927. Both had joined the Air Force in 1951. Both had served in the Far East -- Anderson in Korea with the 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron; Heyser in Japan.

As they entered the air space of western Cuba that Sunday, forewarned of possible ground fire, they were agreeably surprised to encounter none. They made their planned sweep of suspect areas, with San Cristóbal at the top of the list. They then flew home, skidding in safely with the wings folded down at the tips to prevent ground looping. Their film magazines were quickly unloaded and transferred to a waiting jet for the flight to Washington. For Anderson and Heyser it had been an uneventful mission. (page 26-7)

General Marshall S. Carter is identified by Abel as deputy director of the CIA.

Once again, when the Soviets and Cubans could have shot the U-2s down they did not, permitting them to make the full photographic record the United States soon used with such effectiveness, by the President when he went to the nation with the information and by Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations. Again, this means that the Soviets wanted us to have the proof it never made any effort to hide, the proof that would force the issue, give Kennedy his own "tiger to ride" with the choice of war or peace, of what the United States had made so virtually important to the USSR, of invading or not invading Cuba.

At that same point, on his page 23, Abel also reports that McCone had earlier warned that the Soviets mights install such missiles in Cuba, before Wright developed the proof on September 5.

To put this more bluntly, the military had every reason to believe not later than September 5 that Soviet missiles either were already in Cuba or would soon be there and it said not a word to the President until October 16!

Information like this should be withheld from the President?

From the country, for that matter? Why?

Other than to make war more likely, war that could begin with a nuclear attack on the United States if Khrushchev had that intention.

And for the five and a half weeks -- 39 days -- when there were no U-2 overflights there was no information on the state of readiness of this missile installation!

What purpose was or could have been served by this secrecy, this omnipresent curse of so much secrecy with the ultimate in disasters possible?

The USSR knew it had those missiles there, ready to fire or not but there. The military secrecy withheld nothing from the USSR. And as we have seen, it made no effort to disguise what it was doing. So there was nothing to be gained by not letting the USSR know that we knew when it did all but place ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post to let it be known!

All that this incredible secrecy did was to make a situation of extraordinary, of unprecedented danger to us and to the world infinitely more dangerous.

Making the likelihood of a totally unnecessary war ever greater.

Consistent with this astounding secrecy the military waited almost a year to honor Wright for his "crucial contribution." His "crucial contribution" that consisted of "pin-pointing the location of the first medium-range ballistic missiles deployed by the USSR in the western hemisphere."

This language alone makes it clear that the military knew on September 5 that there were Soviet missile installations in Cuba but pretended it did not know this until October 14 and then notified the President on October 16. All it got on October 14 was confirmation of what it already knew and pictures to show the world and to inflame the world with. It for those 39 days denied the President any opportunity of defusing this situation of entirely unprecedented danger to the country and to much of the world -- to mankind itself!

But this horror was not entirely without some good coming to the military from it.

The Air Force did win its bureaucratic fight with the CIA. Even if that fight did waste the only days U-2s could have flown over Cuba and learned more.

Throughout I have in various ways referred to the really entirely unprecedented situation our youngest President faced with the proliferation of nuclear weaponry on both sides and their greatly increased destructive power. It was every so much greater than the then unimaginable destructiveness of the two atom bombs President Truman had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the totality and extent of the destructiveness of which shook the world as it had never before been shaken. Khrushchev did give Kennedy his own Tiger to Ride in the Cuba Missile crisis. How Kennedy managed to keep firm and calm control over himself and his emotions when confronted with the decision like no other decision anyone ever had to make in the history of the world and to at the same time prevent what could have set the world afire as it had never been before is not really dealt with in anything I recall reading. This, too, must be without precedent in the world's history. There are, I believe, very few men who could have preserved that kind of self-control and the control over the forces inside his own government, with all their great power and influence, over so many men who were so determined that he make the decision that it is now without any rational question would have been the most terribly wrong decision in the world's history. That he was able to is a little-noted and never really explained extraordinary accomplishment. That we have and know the world as it now is I believe entirely because he was able to do what for most political leaders would have been quite impossible.

While at the same time avoiding what could have forced Khrushchev's hand and in that way setting monstrous forces into irretrievable motion. That on his part Khrushchev took no such irreversible step earns him the world's respect and appreciation.

However much we as Americans may be unwilling to face it and always refer to it as other than what it was, this was the inevitable consequence of our long-time intrusion where we had no business to intrude in other countries. This is what we faced, in its most extreme and most dangerous form, when we did this with Cuba after Castro took power and when after the Bay of Pigs invasion which was really our invasion by proxy, an act of war in itself, Khrushchev promised to come to Cuba's defense. Once Castro learned of the United States continuing with such efforts, particularly in Operation Mongoose, and then when Castro then sent his brother Raul and Che Guevara publicly to Moscow to ask the Soviets to meet the obligation they had assumed, Khrushchev's hand was forced.

Because there was and is no way in which Cuba can be defended from a United States invasion, Khrushchev chose this way of defending Cuba. He did that very dangerously and very successfully, doing it the way he did passed the buck back to President Kennedy.

The pressures and challenges on those two men as utterly unalike as they were when they managed to keep it from becoming the most terrible event in man's recorded history make it an extraordinary tribute to both of them.

They then started groping toward peace. Each was the captive of his own domestic situation. Each also was awesomely aware of the consequences of failure from what they has just been through. Each had his own hardliners to survive (as neither did) and try to control. We know not as much as we should of those unhappy with Khrushchev. We have seen and we soon have a further reflection of those who opposed Kennedy and what they not only were capable of - - what they planned.

Kennedy's assassination and his successor's opting for the opposite policies made it inevitable that those USSR forces would come to believe that they could not have Khrushchev who had become the Soviet counterpart of JFK's dovishness, confront the hawk Johnson the Kennedy assassination had them confronting. Without personal injury to him they kicked Khrushchev out and allowed him to live the rest of his natural life in peace. Even to write his memoirs.

There are United States documents then secret they may or may not have known about, probably not. But they needed no documents to tell them the different kind of President Johnson would be and the different policies that would be his. They were quite visible before the Khrushchev ouster.

What Kennedy knew at the time of the Cuba missile crisis is in part reflected above. He had an even more frightening torment of the heinous possibilities that were fixed by the military and in place. It is not easy to believe that he was not convinced he was dealing with madmen from what he knew before the Cuba Missile crisis.

He was dealing with real live Strangeloves. Many of them.

A historian who has a clear anti-Kennedy record provides an unintended extra dimension to this unprecedented and exceptional Kennedy and Khrushchev accomplishment. He gives us an even more harrowing account of what it could have eventuated had Kennedy made the wrong decision in 1962, the decision all of his military and many -- initially most -- of his civilian advisers were so determined that he make.

Three months into his Presidency Kennedy's learning of his military and its means of creating policy began with the disaster and national humiliation of the Bay of Pigs. The humiliation was that of the nation, not of the President alone. His manful assumption of all responsibility increased his popularity considerably. In five more months he learned that the military believed it had the constitutional responsibility for making national policy, not the elected President.

He then learned that the military had arranged to take from him any control over where it dropped those most terrible of all weapons of destruction in the world's history, nuclear bombs. The sole option the military allowed the president in its concept -- any president because presidents come and go -- was deciding when those horror bombs would be started. Where they would go and how many of them he had and could have nothing to do with!

Historian Richard Reeves does not have a pro-Kennedy record in his earlier books. He attracted attention and sales to them and to himself with their anti-Kennedy content. But in his 1993 President Kennedy: Profile of Power, this is what he wrote:

In was only then, on September 13, 1961, after eight months in office, that Kennedy finally sat down for a two-hour briefing on the United States' most guarded secret, the plan for nuclear war. It was officially called SIOP-62 -- Single Integrated Operational Plan for Fiscal Year 1962. The military did not volunteer its own information and plans when it had reason to believe that presidents might change them. What presidents didn't know couldn't hurt the military, or so reasoned generals and admirals who saw presidents come and go. Kennedy knew the general outlines of the SIOP, which had been described to him by Bundy as "a massive, total, comprehensive, obliterating strategic attack . . . on everything Red." Once a president said yes to touching a nuclear button, his power shifted to the military. The chain of command was a gigantic and deadly snake with a life of its own if the Commander-in-Chief opened the cage.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lemnitzer, did the briefing himself, setting up easels with thirty-eight flip charts of target and deployment maps. There were 3,729 targets on the cards, which would, according to plan, be destroyed by 1,060 bombs or warheads. At all times, the President was told, 1,530 missiles and bombers were on full alert, meaning they could be launched or sent within fifteen minutes of a presidential command. Another 1,737 weapons were on "non-alert" status, meaning they could be fired or sent with six hours of command.

After a presidential order or stand-by authorization was given, Lemnitzer said, "the JCS will designate E-Hour and the appropriate execution option" -- "E" as in execution. Then he said: "Under any circumstances -- even a preemptive attack by the US -- it would be expected that some portion of the Soviet long- range nuclear force would strike the United States.

Ending his presentation, Lemnitzer demonstrated the rigidity Kennedy most hated about the military: "It must clearly be understood that any decision to execute only a portion of the entire plan would involve acceptance of certain grave risks . . . There is no effective mechanism for rapid rework on the plan, after order for its execution, for a different set of conditions than for which it was prepared."

Kennedy was tapping his front teeth with the fingernail of his thumb for the last twenty minutes of Lemnitzer's show, a sign to those who knew him that he was either bored or furious. And there was nothing boring about the plan.

"Why do we hit all those targets in China, General?" Kennedy asked. The Chinese had no missiles, no nuclear delivery systems.

"It's in the plan, Mr. President," said the general.

Kennedy was gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles showed white. As he walked out of the room with Dean Rusk, he said: "And we call ourselves the human race." (pages 229-30)

Reeves has 12 source notes for these two pages. They include the SIOP itself.

What this actually says and means is that the military created the situation in which it was in charge, not any president. One of the means by which it was able to create this situation is keeping what it was doing secret from the president. If in 1962 the President decided that it was necessary to drop a single nuclear bomb, the military, being in charge and knowing better, as it understood it than any president, would begin by dropping more than a thousand of them on more than 3700 targets, and that within a quarter of an hour of getting any permission to drop a single one. It would then decide when to start the destruction of much of the world and all the people there. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were child's games compared with SIOP-62. Tin-soldier stuff to what Lemnitzer laid out to Kennedy.

And nothing could be done about it.

All it permitted the President -- any president -- was the decision to drop a single nuclear bomb. If in fact they let him decide that.

It was not only on China that if a single bomb was authorized it would drop all it wanted to drop, either. They were going to wipe Albania out too! Little Albania! No threat to anyone.

As Reeves says in one of his source notes (page 696), when Secretary of Defense McNamara was first briefed on the SIOP the month after the Kennedy administration was sworn in, General Thomas Power told him, "Well, Mr. Secretary, I hope you don't have any friends or relations in Albania because we are going to have to wipe it out."

Not only did the military give the President to understand that it would do whatever it damned please, including wiping out much of the populated area of the entire world. It made it clear that once the President, who had no control over it once he decided that a single bomb was to be dropped, would be held responsible for what the military did and he did not authorize it to do.

The military's plan, which neither he nor any other president had anything to do with, could not be changed.

They would "wipe out" much of Europe and Asia.

How much worry and trouble therefore, how much greater his unknown distress, at the time of the next year's Cuba Missile Crisis!

Presidents do come and go, as Reeves says, but not the JCS. They do not change. They remain cloned on Dr. Strangelove.

As R. Jeffrey Smith reported in the Washington Post of September 22, 1994, President Clinton accepted the Pentagon recommendation to make no changes in basic nuclear policy. It put off further nuclear-arms reductions with Russia and preserved the right to first-use of nuclear weapons. ("Right" is the government's word repeated by the Post. It is not a "right." There is no such "right." This is fancy pants talk for a unilateral option and not a "right" bestowed by anything at all or by any authority.)

This meant continuing to keep almost 500 nuclear weapons in Europe, improving those for our nuclear submarines and preserving its plan for destroying about 2,500 targets in Russia from the existing arsenal of 6,000 strategic weapons nuclear.

First under Clinton the scope of this review was downscaled, so less of the existing policy was reviewed.

One of the officials who urged more cuts told Smith that the civilians were afraid of the military.

And to make it all easier, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Clinton's National Security adviser Anthony Lake were not involved in this review of nuclear policy for the coming decade.

How much had the danger from Russia increased after the USSR had come apart?

In an adjoining story the Post reported that "The central command for Russia's strategic nuclear missile forces had its power cut off for failing to pay its electric bills" for quite some time.

The same thing happened to the Russian "mammoth nuclear shipbuilding facility." Its power station was closed down for non-payment of bills.

This increased the danger to the United States?

There is no reference to Albania or China in Smith's story. That there can be 2500 targets in Russia as distinguished from the entire USSR, can account for the report of reduction of about 1200 targets under this plan for the decade. It seems like a rather large number of remaining individual targets. Whether or not, what Smith does not to into, the other countries of SIOP-62, countries earlier unidentified and those identified, Albania and China, are within the same plan. Or the "anything Red" in national-security adviser McGeorge Bundy's interpretation of SIOP-62.

As Smith's story also says, when this study was prepared, the "key work (was) turned over the military officers and Bush administration holdovers."

Not entirely to coin a phrase, the more things are not intended to change the more they do not change.

So the SIOP-62 policy remains the national policy and the destruction under it may well be greater because of the increasing destructive power of nuclear bombs more than 20 years later.

This is to be the country's nuclear policy for at least the decade ahead.

This is also to say that with the Cold War ended from the dissolution of the USSR United States nuclear destruction policy continues just as it was. This does not require a new Cold War. It requires only an understanding of the military and its mind and policies.

According to the military we needed the enormous expenditures for all those nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them plus the magnitude of the problems that come from merely making and possessing them and in the end having to dispose of them, all those warheads that were sufficient to destroy the world several times over, because of the Cold War.

Now that there is no Cold War we still need them and the policy of needing and retaining them for at least the coming decade, with improvement in some and the manufacture of still new ones when the country is so broke it cannot keep all its schools and libraries open; can't provide medical care and homes to hose who need medical care and homes; can't repair and make charitable public housing that went to pot; can't provide enough police for the streets or jails to hold criminals; and all the other real needs the country without question has because of the nuclear needs of the Cold War that are still the nuclear needs when there is no Cold War.

Does it make sense?

Of course it makes sense! To the military.

There is no John Kennedy to hear of all of this and comment, "And we call ourselves the human race."

This SIOP-62 design for wiping out much of the world and for poisoning the rest of it was for what was called a "preventive" war. That concept did not originate with this SIOP-62 to back to the more modest and less inhumane military concepts and practices of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. As we here consider it, it began not later than the military plans of the first Eisenhower administration.

David Wise was an experienced Washington correspondent before turning to political and intelligence exposé books. He was the New York Herald Tribune's White House reporter during the Kennedy administration and then its bureau chief until 1966. With another experienced reporter, Thomas B. Ross, he coauthored several exposé books, including two about intelligence, The Invisible Government and The Espionage Establishment. Both were published by Random House, in 1964 and 1967. Both were best sellers, as was Wise's 1973 book, also published by Random House, The Politics of Lying. It is a thorough-going and frightening account of government secrecy through extraordinary misuse of "national security" classification claims and of the extensive government lying that made and makes possible.

Robert J. Donovan preceded Wise as that Republican newspapers White House correspondent. When Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's top assistant, "conceived the idea of letting a journalist have access to the administration's internal papers, classified and otherwise, to write a book" promoting Eisenhower, naturally, that paper was asked for a reporter to do the writing, Donovan agreed when his stipulation of complete independence was agreed to. (pages 103-4) After clearance Donovan took a leave of absence from the newspaper. He was then given an office in the White House and as he told Wise, "They brought in documents in wheelbarrows and on dollies . . . . A great many were classified . . . ." (page 104)

As Wise continues:

One of the most chilling secrets that Donovan learned while researching the book came not from a classified document but in a conversation with Robert Cutler, Eisenhower's assistant for national security affairs. Some of the most tight- lipped men in the White House became babbling fountains of information when Adams told them curtly: "The President wants you to talk to Bob Donovan."

Certainly Cutler was not normally celebrated for talking to newsmen. But over dinner at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, Donovan said, Cutler cryptically disclosed that "there had been discussions of preventive war within the councils of the government." Cutler provided no details, and it was clear that if Donovan pursued the matter further, Cutler would refuse to discuss it. But, as Donovan recalls the meeting, "when he got into preventive war, I nearly fell off my chair."

Leafing through government secrets at the White House one day, Donovan came across a Top Secret document that concisely summarized the administration's philosophy of the military New Look. "It was stated so superbly," said Donovan, "that I paraphrased it closely, so close in fact that the NSC raised holy hell and threatened to blow the whole thing out of the water." Dillon Anderson, a conservative Houston lawyer who had replaced Cutler, wrote a two-page memo to Sherman Adams on why the book should not be published.

The memo led to an angry White House confrontation between Adams and Anderson, with Donovan present. "Adams was white and shaking," Donovan said, but he held fast to this commitment to Donovan and the project continued. Then, according to Donovan, people like Tom Stephens, who had been Eisenhower's appointments secretary, and press secretary James C. Hagerty "became worried that the book would tell too much." Despite all these pressures, Donovan wrote the book in 163 days; it was published in May of 1956, and became the nation's number one best seller. (pages 104-5)

"New look" or "preventive war" or SIOP-63, it is all the same thing, a surprise nuclear holocaust. It does not "prevent" a war -- it starts one. The difference is that in 1956 we could not begin to destroy nearly as much of what was conceived as the enemy world because we had so relatively few weapons capable of it. That is why in 1961 the SIOP was for 1963, when we would have the arsenal the military wanted to be able to destroy much of Asia and Europe with their surprise attack of their Single Integrated Operating Plan.

The Kennedy administration inherited this from the Eisenhower administration, as it had the involvement already begun in Southeast Asia and the Bay of Pigs scheme to get us to invade Cuba despite Kennedy's unwillingness.

Chapter 6: Cui Bono?

In the summer of 1966, after I'd written my second book (Whitewash II: The FBI-Secret Service Cover-Up) I awakened after only a few hours of sleep with part of something I'd long wanted to say in mind. Before washing and dressing I began banging away on the old Underwood upright which was favored in many newsrooms because it could take that pounding and, except to wash, dress and get some coffee made, I did not stop working even for breakfast, which I ate at my desk, until I'd completed the Epilogue to that book. In it, for the first time, I raised the question asked by lawyers but not by lawyers alone, "cui bono?"

Who benefits is always a question the answer to which should be sought.

Before I began writing my first book, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, which was completed by mid-February, 1964, five months after the Warren Report was published and only about three months after the Commission published its 26 volumes of appendix, its testimony and exhibits, I was troubled that the media was not asking this and other questions. Questions I believed were obvious.

Shortly after the assassination I spent some time with Tom Wolfe when he was a Washington Post reporter. He typed a list of some of the unanswered questions that I'd thought of. If he did any more than type that list I am not aware of it.

I spoke to others and nobody was interested. It was clearly a story on which the papers were toeing the official line.

In 1962 I had a similar experience after I had evolved the analysis of the then on-going Cuba Missile Crisis I later planned to write Tiger to Ride about. I remember it was the Wednesday afternoon of the height of the crisis that I spoke to the then Washington Post foreign editor. When I told him what I believed, that Khrushchev put those missiles in Cuba for bargaining, not for use, he told me, "We had the same idea but we discarded it."

It was only two days later that Khrushchev made his first solution proposal to President Kennedy.

I spoke to others about both subjects with the same non-reaction. These happened to be the first two.

So, I started work when the Report was out. I began posing these questions and there have been no official answers.

My first book, based entirely on the official evidence then available, leaves it without any question at all: the official evidence itself proves with absoluteness that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.

To this day, no error, no matter how small, has been shown in that book.

There was a conspiracy and officialdom knew there was a conspiracy.

That this was officially "whitewashed" and "covered up" is not an answer to the question, who benefits.

It can be interpreted that way but I then did not and I have not since then. There were, I am confident, other reasons for the official determination that was its own de facto conspiracy, not to investigate the crime itself.

So "cui bono" is the question that lingers, that has not gone away.

It is the question I address herein. Not by claiming what I present is absolute proof. It is not that. But it does address another lawyers' approach, who had "motive, means and opportunity." This means circumstantial evidence. What I assemble herein is not more than that. But I think it is enough to require some effort to resolve the question.

On motive this is, I believe, powerful.

And all of it was available to everyone with any interest, especially the major media. Which, obviously, had no interest.

If the assassination of the President was a planned rather than a de facto coup d'etat, and if the conspiracy to kill him had any rational basis at all, that basis was faulty -- bad, from a very wrong analysis.

If our policy and then our actions in Vietnam had any rational basis, that, too was faulty, very wrong. As generals deGaulle and MacArthur both warned President Kennedy.

This is also true in the Cuba Missile Crisis. It was the inevitable result of our own actions that were pursuant to policies that if they had any rational basis at all they came from still another faulty analysis. However, the greater possibility is that it was a knee-jerk reaction and not the result of any analysis at all.

When policies and actions come not from analysis or from knee-jerk reactions they come from political mind-sets and political policies. The political policies that wound up being called The Cold War began long before the war against Hitler was won. It is an enlargement of domestic political policies in this country of a minority that became a majority, the minority that regarded all efforts by working people to improve their lots as of Communist origin or inspiration. Earlier policies to keep from paying a decent living wage were described as Communist once Karl Marx could be made into a symbol for evil. In later years in the 1930s, I was part of the Senate's investigation of abuses that were attributed to the need to defeat Communists and Communism when those who were defeated were ordinary, everyday working Americans and their families.

World War I was hardly over when then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his then youthful right-hand man J. Edgar Hoover were forcibly deporting those they referred to as Communists and anarchists of whom there were really very few, when in fact what they were those who speaking for better working conditions and on behalf of political beliefs the Palmers and Hoovers did not approve of. They were deported physically and by the ship load, without access to the legal system, to the traditional and in a land of laws the required due process of law. Under which they could not have been deported. Shiploads were forcibly deported this way, a national shame unknown to our younger generations, the shame that was the beginning of Hoover's long career when he soon thereafter headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation as its first director and became known as the greatest Red-Hunter of all.

Then came the committee's that called themselves on Un-American activities when that rather than the subject of their investigation was a description of what they did, with enormous media attention that fixed the national mind, as Hoover had earlier and the Joe McCarthys did later.

During World War II when I was in OSS I recall that a few of our European echelons along with some of the Army's began a secret war against the USSR, then our ally and the ally that killed more Nazi solders than all its allies together killed. Among the earlier such acts that I recall are the OSS theft of a large number of bags of Soviet Army mail and an Army jeep expedition into the Soviet-held part of Austria for an espionage purpose at which they were caught.

Then there were the efforts to protect anti-Soviet Nazis and to use them against the Soviets. A number of books have been written about this. I have a high opinion of then correspondent, later university journalism professor Linda Hunt's Secret Agenda. (It was published in 1991 by St. Martin's Press, in New York City.) Our rocketry was advanced by Nazi war criminals.

We took over the Gehlen anti-Soviet Nazi intelligence and made it ours. General Gehlen lived out his life without punishment, as did those under him, regardless of their war crimes. Our Army even hid from the State Department captured Nazi records that identified Nazis they might want to use and to keep the USSR from using them for prosecuting war criminals. I was once called back from leave to tell the then head of State intelligence and a man dedicated to rooting Nazi war criminals out where some of those records the army hid were stashed away, that information having passed through my hands. When Mussolini and his mistress were captured by Italian partisans who trusted us, his some 25 suitcases of records were microfilmed and flown to the Pentagon where they disappeared. A French refugee economist engaged in war work for our government had the same experience I did in trying to locate and examine those microfilms of Mussolini's records when he was captured.

The Vatican helped Nazi war criminals escape, as did anti-communists of many hues and colors, some with Nazi odors of their own. For them to call themselves anti-Communists was all they needed for acceptance.

Then there were the blacklists that included some of the most prominent, most talented and most devotedly democratic in the arts and sciences as well as ordinary working people and union leaders. As a result of these massive efforts, anything that called itself anti-Communist was accepted and respected no matter how anti-democratic, irrational and even just plain silly it really was. The national mindset was fixed.

This was not limited to the United States. In varying degrees it existed in most of the developed countries. It was Winston Churchill who sounded Harry Truman's Cold War battlecry for him with his Iron Curtain speech in this country. That is the same Winston Churchill who, according to the authoritative British book C, the full title, that being the Britain's chief of intelligence was known, ordered the redirection of British intelligence against the USSR as soon as the beachhead in France was secure. ("C" was _______ Menzies. The book is ______________.)

Even the American Heritage magazine for September, 1994 highlights the contents of that issue on its cover, in large type, "The United States started the Cold War." It next, also in large type, features on its cover, "We should have made peace with Hitler."

With the passing of time, there came to be some public admission of this fact, we did start the Cold War.

What was called anti-Communism and The Cold War became a national state of mind as well as a national policy that justified anything at all. It was the shibboleth for getting and keeping government jobs of all grades including, of course, the very highest. It was also the basis for recruiting into our intelligence services after World War II.

It resulted in some amazing examples in "intelligence" reports.

I remember a very early CIA report of the later 1940s on the small South American country of Paraguay when I was in a part of State intelligence and temporarily sat on the Paraguay desk of my division. Paraguay then had two major political parties. They were known by their colors, Blanco for the party of the white color, Colorado for the party of the red color. One was more liberal than the other, which was more than just conservative. It was the party of the vicious, Nazi-like dictatorship of Hecter Morinigo. That CIA intelligence memo identified the Colorado Party as Communist. It was a natural enough assumption, its color being red. But intelligence is not based on assumptions. It is supposed to be based upon fact. And in Paraguay the Colorado or "red" party was that of the Morinigo dictatorship. The mildly liberal party was the Blancos, the whites.

This kind of stupid mistake that could have influenced policy was the natural consequences of the recruiting that favored those of this political mindset from the Ivy League.

And it lingers in our intelligence services, all of which were and remain geared to the Cold War.

Analysis is the essence of intelligence. In recent years we have a grim record of basic policy coming from wrong analyses.

In saying that I was able to make and did make correct analyses of the Cuba Missile Crisis and of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as it was called, contemporaneously when others did not I am not boasting. I am criticizing. Seeing the obvious is not cause for boasting. Missing or not understanding the obvious is a legitimate cause of criticism.

Why others did not see what was so obvious could come from different causes and it could vary from person to person. But the likelihood is that those others who did not understand what was happening and why it was happening wore blinders.

Cold-War blinders made those wearing them look only straight ahead, looking for the color red and looking for it so concentratedly they could not see black and white. Unlike the blinders added to the harnesses of horses, those in the CIA and other agencies were recruited and worked because they had those blinders already in place in their minds. It remains to be seen, even if national policy is changed radically, if they can escape the focus of their blinders of their minds.

However, there came a time, disgrace having followed rapidly on the heels of fiasco after fiasco from which, apparently there was no visible CIA suffering, when it was forced to take a look at itself and then speak out. More or less.

That was when one of its senior and long-time spook employees, Aldrich H. Ames was caught spying and confessed to uncovering more than 50 CIA intelligence operations to the KGB. An October 1 story reported that he also betrayed 36 United States and allied paid agents. He was undetected for years despite extravagant living it up with what he got from the KGB. That did compel some CIA introspection and self-criticism. This was disclosed for the papers of the day before the number of operations Ames blew was to be disclosed, taking a bit of the edge off of that long series of spook disasters.

Douglas J. MacEachin who was the CIA's deputy director for intelligence was fourth in its hierarchy wrote this criticism in a paper published by the Washington non-profit think tank the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence. Coinciding with this publication MacEachin was interviewed by the Washington Post's Walter Pincus. His interview appeared in the September 23, 1993 issue. In the interview, MacEachin, in Pincus' words, "called for a new emphasis on facts and the analysis derived from them" by the CIA.

That is new?

That is what intelligence has always been supposed to be.

And was until corrupted by what is euphemistically termed "dirty tricks" that range up to and include overthrowing governments and assassinations. The CIA had a major component devoted to just these kinds of non-intelligence functions. It was disguised in the table of organization by being referred to as "plans" and later as "operations." This story-book stuff that was never of any real value, this synthetic James Bondery, grew to where it became most important within the CIA while its basic function withered and atrophied.

This misdirected effort not only sublimated the missing essence of intelligence, dependable analyses, it tended to hide the failures of those supposedly devoted to traditional intelligence the importance of which has never been superseded.

In confessing that his people had to start all over again in the intelligence kindergarten, MacEachin also admitted that CIA failures "often came because analysts made what he called wrong judgements about the driving or 'linchpin' factors," Pincus wrote.

Without any mention of preconditioning, mindsets and Cold War policy controlling what intelligence reported, MacEachin attributed these analysis failures to "analysts wanting to give readers [those who received their reports] forecasts and predictions without giving them the facts and analysis that led to those conclusions," Pincus wrote.

Another reason was that the analysts were "part of a production system for classified reports that emphasized the needs for getting promoted rather than the needs of policymakers."

In plainer English they reported what those who read their reports wanted to read rather than the facts not to risk the fate of the messenger killed over the message he bore.

What a remarkable confession the meaning of which the Post did not point out by one of the CIA's top four, that after about 45 years, it had to start from scratch after Harry Truman disbanded the OSS. How well and how dependably it can do that without another beginning from scratch, with new people recruited without their hearts and minds locked into the Cold War remains to be seen. The CIA is not staffed, as intelligence agencies should be, with those of a bent to be or trained to be impartial and whose educations are not educations with Cold War indoctrination.

As we have seen, those at the top of all the main branches of the military are so determinedly the apotheosis of Cold Warriors it is not likely that any more than those at the top in the CIA saw to the promotion of those not cloned on them or, if there were any intelligence analysts not themselves Cold Warriors would give them any heed.

There is no belated confession of the most serious weakness in our intelligence, its political weaknesses, reported in the Pincus article. These political weaknesses were part of the CIA's adherence to and help in the creation and perfection of national Cold War policy rather than being as all good intelligence agencies should be, completely independent and now hewing to any political line.

Thus many CIA projects that on the face seemed like successes were ultimately great disasters. But to begin with they gave the CIA a good press and were well received in the White House where the politicians liked them.

An example of this is its overthrow of the democratic government of Iran. It had expelled the dictatorial king, dictatorial even for kings he was, too. When the Mossadegh government in Iran nationalized the oil wells, the CIA began a campaign against that emotional nationalist Mossadegh, who had a clear record of anti-Communism, in which it succeeded in having this anti- Communist nationalist regarded as a Communist in Iran and around the world. After it succeeded in getting Mossadegh overthrown it put the king back in power. And, junior-grade Hitler that he was, he created and nurtured opposition to himself and to his policies. While for a short period of time his petroleum policies pleased the world's major petroleum corporations and governments like ours, he grew more and more unpopular. The more unpopular he grew the more we armed, trained and equipped his police in the arts of repression and torture, as we did elsewhere in the world. The more we helped him abuse his people and siphon off the country's wealth the more certain it became that he would be overthrown.

And who did that shah hire for counsel and advice? The former head of the CIA, Richard Helm. When he was overthrown he was succeeded by the tyrannical fundamentalist Muslim government we now know, exporter of international violence and terror and a menace to that part of the world so important because of its petroleum resources and to other Muslims who do not share their extremist interpretation of the Koran.

The real reason for overthrowing the Mossadegh government was not because it was Communist, which it wasn't, but because it took back from the foreign oil corporations ownership of the oil wells. The oil from which it sold so the oil itself was never denied.

Working for more profit for large non-government corporations is not a proper function of an intelligence agency and in this instance, Iran, the OSS could hardly have created a greater disaster that it originally touted as a great success.

Intelligence agencies can and do hide behind secrecy. They pretend they cannot talk about their claimed great successes because all of that has to be secret in the interest of "national security." In fact they all find ways of leaking their claims to great success. The politicized CIA has few legitimate claims to successes of any real value to the nation. But it was and is adept at taking credit for what it had nothing to do with. Thus at the time it leaked the text of Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin's terror and paranoia it gave the world the impression that by its skilled intelligence operations inside the USSR it got that speech text. The truth is the opposite. The CIA had nothing to do with getting the text of that speech. It was a gift from Israeli intelligence.

A Polish Jew who emigrated to Israel and had a copy of that Khrushchev speech took it with him. He gave it to Israeli intelligence. It have it to the CIA. And as clearly reported in the Israeli press, this is the truth about that greatest of CIA Cold War coups: it had nothing to do with getting it.

The real situation is that when the then head of the CIA, Richard Helms, was caught in perjury, a felony, and the government that wanted to help him charged him with much less than it could have, he was praised as a patriot for his perjury to the Congress by his lawyer after the sentence that was hardly even a tap on the wrist. Who was his lawyer? The eminent and respected Edward Bennett Williams had long been a member of the president's intelligence advisory or "oversight" board. He approved the CIA's excesses. Those of which it knew at least.

(As we saw above, it was Brendan Sullivan of the Edward Bennett Williams law firm who made a national hero of the convicted felon Oliver North who on the Reagan White House staff implemented policies that violated our Constitution and our laws in its childish concept of what intelligence is and what intelligence agencies do.)

In the military there was not even any phony pretense of "oversight." Those at the top were Cold Warriors or with rare exceptions they would never have gotten to the top. They wanted around them and to hear from only those of like mind. As we have seen, all of them could not have been more unanimously opposed to their President's policies, the president begin the one who under our Constitution alone has the right and duty of deciding policy. They opposed him and his policies conscientiously and with determination. They were all the product of their branches of the military and of the educational institutions all have of which those of the Army at West Point and of the Navy at Annapolis are the best known and most high regarded. But there are many others for more advanced study. That all at the top in all the military services were of the same political mind cannot be an accident. They were the intended product. The product that may well have believed that President Kennedy was "weak on Communism" or worse than that, in Cold War terms. They could easily have seen him as their enemy and therefore the country's enemy. And that frustrating his policies, as they did, was the apotheosis of the true patriotism.

All of those in the military to command who opposed Kennedy's policies could not have done that on the basis of impartial intelligence analysis. They, personally, were incapable of making their own impartial analyses. They could think in terms of the Cold War only and they could analyze in no other terms. If they had wanted to try to think as he thought, tried to understand his policies, they could not have. Not with their minds captive of Cold War belief and doctrine, their road to their successes in the ranks they held.

No matter how much they were proven wrong in the field, as in Vietnam, they explained it away with the lies they came to believe. They lived lies and nothing but the lies they believed and lived were the truth to them, incredible as it may seem.

And, or course, they had their own policy, their own ultimate in the true patriotism, getting into a land war with China to wipe that bastion of Communist out with, as they said, with nuclear weapons. That was at a time when China had neither nuclear weapons nor the means of delivering them as Kennedy noted when SIOP-62 was explained to him.

(Is it to wonder why so many countries that could ill afford it decided that they had to have their own nuclear arsenals?)

There is no questioning the genuineness of their beliefs and their conviction that what they believed represented the true patriotism. Like wise there was no reason to question the genuiness of Khoumeni's beliefs in Iran or the sincerity of those who adhered to his beliefs and who followed him. Our military became in effect our Khoumenis, as what we have seen about what they said and did and tried to do about Vietnam and Cuba illustrate. What they did was wrong under our supposedly controlling Constitution that they all swore to uphold and defend. It was wrong under our international obligations, as to the United Nations. It was wrong under our treaties and agreements, as with the Organization of American States and in individual treaties. But they saw what they wanted to do as right, not wrong, as their obligation as patriots who loved their country, and thus wrong became right to them.

And thus, inevitably, to them a President like Kennedy was wrong, not right. They in their view were the true patriots, they understood and pursued the needs of the nation, not he.

The possibility that with their mindsets and beliefs they came to regard him as the country's enemy cannot be ignored.

These are the people, remember, who regarded it as right and as necessary to lay waste and prevent the production of food in half of the agricultural country of Vietnam in order to "save" it and the people whose lives would be ruined by what they wanted to do and to a slightly lesser degree later did do.

They are the ones who wanted to bomb the hell out of Cuba and then invade it with our army for the imagined sin of doing what they themselves had done elsewhere. Cuba accepted Soviet missiles and it is presumed nuclear warheads for them. That was to our military entirely wrong. To them what was right was their having our armed missiles in Turkey, on the Soviet border, not separated from it by the sea.

As it was right for them to have our nuclear missiles in Italy and in England so much closer to the Soviet heartland than the United States.

What was right for them in multiples was wrong for Cuba and the USSR.

And as the record shows, they really believed it.

They had no concern for the people of Vietnam or of Cuba and what if they had their way would have happened to those people and to a large degree did happen to them in Vietnam.

They are the people who were not content with victory, victory for the policy they opposed, of getting those missiles out of Cuba without their going to war over it, without laying Cuba waste in a war that was not necessary and was proven to be not necessary. Our military were the people who not content with the victory achieved despite them and only by opposing them and they wanted to bomb Cuba anyway and sink Soviet merchant ships and submarines anyway. After peace, after victory.

Which was among the more likely ways of starting World War III.

To them the true patriotism was in violating orders, as in harassing Soviet submarines on the high seas to which they had as much right as we did. They did that in spite of specific Presidential orders not to do it, and then told the Secretary of Defense, when he caught them at it, politely to go to hell and they continued doing that -- in direct violation of the specific orders of their commander in chief.

These were the truly dedicated people who, as we have seen, were going to be the ones and the only ones to decide, if their commander in chief authorized the use of a single nuclear weapon, when to start and where to nuclear bomb without limit on the numbers of bombs or where they bombed. In effect, they took control over nuclear bombing from the president.

The military people who then would nuclear bomb "3,729 targets" with more then the number of nuclear bombs required for this in reserve that "could be fired within six hours," killing more people than had ever been killed in the history of the world and laying waste to more than 3,000 cities alone. They would have been reduced to radioactive dust and rendered farmland incapable of producing other than food that would kill on being eaten -- killing millions and millions of innocent people in virtually an instant, so many millions it would have made Hitler look like a Boy Scout with an Honor rating.

This, to them, was the true patriotism, the true reflection of love of country. Otherwise they would not have fixed it in their plan they saw to it was inflexible and not subject to change.

All these things they genuinely believed were the country's urgent need, what their love of country required of them, their manifestation of true patriotism. Beginning with starting war with the USSR, laying Vietnam and Cuba waste, and then wiping out much of Europe and Asia, in their one incomplete account from Albania on the south to China and the Pacific on the east and all in between and as far north in the USSR as they considered necessary. That certainly included all the major cities in Poland and Russia, killing all the millions of people in them at the same time. This is what they wanted, what they regarded as necessary and what JFK opposed successfully.

Kennedy's other quests for peace in the world and for the reducing the means of destruction in it were no less infuriating to it, no less a danger to the nation as they saw it.

When as I report above I was talking to Steve Barber about Schlesinger's A Thousand Days there was another paragraph that had grabbed my attention that he had skipped in his hasty reading and the media had not reported. Schlesinger was talking about the mission Kennedy was sending to negotiate the limited test-ban agreement and about China as the long-term danger to peace, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillen's words with which JFK then agreed. In this paragraph I quote (from page 904) Averell Harriman was an elder statesman who had held and then held a high position in the State Department and Karl Kaysen was the former Harvard professor who was then McGeorge's deputy on the National Security Council:

Harriman and Kaysen had a final meeting with the President before the mission's departure for Moscow. Kennedy said that Harriman could go as far as he wished in exploring the possibility of a Soviet-American understanding with regard to China. Averell responded that he would more than ever need something to sweeten the package. Kennedy mentioned possible concessions. The President added, "I have some cash in the bank in West Germany and am prepared to draw on it if you think I should."

Wise and astute as he is Schlesinger must have had some compelling reason as of the time he wrote this excellent book for not explaining his last sentence in this paragraph. What Harriman meant by needing "something to sweeten the package" with is obvious enough but what Kennedy referred to by his "cash in the bank in West Germany" is not. It and what Kennedy next said that he was "prepared to draw upon" it, leaving that up to Harriman stopped me cold.

What was clear is that Kennedy was not talking about cash in the literal sense and was not talking about trying to bribe the Soviets with cash.

What he could have been talking about to use for "concessions" from the USSR seems to be limited to concessions regarding NATO, the anti-Soviet North Atlantic alliance that extended far inland from the Atlantic, or our relations with the then West German government.

That he was prepared to compromise any part of either of these relationships to reach an understanding with the Soviets was quite significant. The military (for which NATO was also a rich source of high-level jobs and for promotions) would certainly have been greatly disturbed by this as it also would have been by any nuclear disarmament, even a little first step.

If the military could in the name of the nation's need and of patriotism slaughter these millions so many more than Hitler slaughtered, it is difficult to believe that they could have regarded killing a single man as less necessary, less the demand of the true patriotism, less their duty?

"Motive, means and opportunity," the lawyers say in addressing a crime.

Nobody had or could have had the motive our military had, and they without any question at all had the means and the opportunity as few others could have.

Those who provided the answer to the question, "who benefitted," were helped enormously by the immediate failure of the media to fulfill its Constitutional role. They just did not report what they should have reported and under normal conditions would have reported.

In terms of importance as news there is little that can be as important as the assassination of a president.

In addition to the fact that the president is the country's leader and that any such crime is exceptionally important to the nation and is the most spectacular and sensational of crimes, by its nature it has the effect of a coup d'etat whatever the intent of the assassin or assassins may be. It nullifies our entire system of freedom through self-government.

When John Kennedy was gunned down, in broad daylight and on the streets of a modern American city, communications were better and more efficient than they had ever been until then. TV was coming into its own. While except as talking heads it was not as instant as it has since become, it was capable of instant communication with the people and it was more rapid in showing pictures than until then it had ever been. It did not take long to air the film then used before videotape and microwave transmission.

By then, too, reporters were better educated than in my reporting youth. Many reporters of my day did not have college degrees. This included the best investigative reporter of that era. Some few did not even complete high school. But by the 1960s it was not uncommon for reporters to have advanced degrees. At least in theory that made them better reporters. Formal education, however, did not make then better investigators. But it did enable them to know and to understand what better education did prepare them to understand that comes from a wider and deeper education.

Although at the time of the JFK assassination there were excellent and experienced investigative reporters, there was no real investigative reporting of which I am aware by the major media when John Kennedy was assassinated.

Had the owners and the editors wanted real investigative reporting reporters would have dug and come up with what was readily available. I knew some very good reporters who worked on that story. They also were some of the better known, more experienced and highly reputed. Some few were on the spot, the others soon were there.

But what was reported was little more than leaks and handouts. Their intent was to make it appear that Lee Harvey was not only the lone assassin but to boot in that Cold War period at its greatest intensity, he was also a "Red". By then the country had been conditioned to hate and fear all "Reds" in every way. So, Oswald as the lone Red assassin became the lead in all coverage. The conditioning, really the self-conditioning of all of the media, was to make the Red assassin story more than merely acceptable.

The supposedly questioning media did not question this. It accepted and reported on Oswald as the lone and unassisted Red assassin.

When ever the very first hard news made the lone assassin story, whether or not he was really some kind of Red, impossible, there was no following up on that lead.

Other than the fact that the President had been killed, the first real news after the shooting, hard news in journalistic terms, with the best of possible sources, was at the official press conference of the Dallas doctors who saw and examined the President at Parkland Hospital. That press conference was the first of the incoming Johnson administration. It was transcribed and made available to the media in Washington very rapidly. But without it, without the verbatim of the entire press conference, all the reporters there heard the only doctor who examined the wound in the front of the President's neck before surgery at that point describe it three times, in response to questions, as an entry wound. He was confirmed by the hospital's chief of neurology.

What Dr. Malcolm Perry said, confirmed by Dr. Kemp Clark, made all the stories although in all I saw it was merely included in the long stories, with scant attention to it, even after Oswald was said to be the lone assassin and firing from the President's back. He therefore could not have fired the shot from the front that the doctors who saw the President and that wound said repeatedly was from the front.

No questions were asked of him when Dr. Perry turned the press conference scheduled for the day after the assassination over the Dr. Clark and then disappeared. If the obvious questions had been asked about the previous day's press conference, all of subsequent history might have been different. The story of the assassination certainly would have been.

J. Edgar Hoover, having ordained Oswald the lone assassin the previous afternoon, could have found his made-up "solution" difficult if not impossible to support and continue to insist upon. The Warren Commission might well have found it impossible to outline its work before any real investigation at all with the hokum Hoover had compelled it to begin with, the lone assassin of its final Report. (See chapter "Conclusions First" in my Post Mortem.)

Arlen Specter, the Commission's counsel in charge of that area of its work, would not have been able to phony up his single-bullet theory that is the basis of the official lone-assassin conclusion. Nor would he have been able to pressure poor Perry into testimony he knew was not true.

When Doctor Clark's testimony was published by the Warren Commission, there was such a great mass of it individual items were necessarily missed in hasty perusal of those 26 large volumes that were made available all at one time in November, 1964, the release of the Report was at the end of that September. But there was no great mass when I brought it to light in the first boom on the Warren Report, my Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report. When it went into general distribution I mailed copies to many newspapers and radio and TV stations and I hand-delivered copies to The Washington Post, Star and Daily News, to the news services and the network Washington bureaus, and those of a number of major newspapers. The Post got several copies. From people at The New York Times I got so many requests for copies that beginning with the thirteenth I asked for payment for them.

At the Times a review was assigned to its then legal reporter, Fred Graham. He was both an experienced reporter in the Washington bureau and a lawyer.

But long before my book appeared the major media marched in lockstep with the official assassination story. It was not seriously questioned in any reporting. The first book on so sensational and important an event got not a single review in any major paper. It got no TV attention at all. Yet it questioned and refuted the official account of the "crime of the century" and did that only with the official evidence itself.

Graham dismissed Whitewash in a single sentence as painstaking and overwhelming, an odd negative criticism.

But while he was reading the book he reflected a high opinion of it, with his complaint, "You have come between my wife and me!" When I asked how that was possible he laughed and said that like him, she could not put it down, and in their busy lives the only time they had to read it was in bed.

The Post's review told me that while he personally intended a favorable review he was told not to do any review at all.

There is no reason to assume that what Doctor Clark testified to when he was under oath he would not have told any inquiring reporter at the second-day Dallas press conference. As I reported his testimony in Whitewash on page 180, from page 23 of Volume 6 of the Commission's published hearings, this is what Clark testified:

"Dr. Perry stated that he had talked to the Bethesda Naval Hospital on two occasions that morning and that he knew what the autopsy findings had shown and that he did not wish to be questioned by the press, as he had been asked by Bethesda to confine his remarks to what he knew from having examined the President, and suggested that the major part of this press conference be conducted by me." Doctor Clark thought two others, whom he named, were witnesses to this conversation (6H23).

To the best of my knowledge Perry never retracted what he said at that first press conference. He did not when I interviewed him, as I report in Post Mortem. Nor do I know of any retraction by Clark. There also is ample, including official confirmation of the fact that the chief autopsy pathologist, Navy Commander H James J. Humes, phone Perry more than the one time he testified to the Commission under oath, of course, that he phoned Perry. He timed that one allegedly only call to Perry at some time well after daylight the morning after the assassination. In fact, in addition to the other plentiful confirmation of Humes' being false testimony given its extreme materiality, perjury, the autopsy radiologist, Dr. John Ebersole, testified to what Specter did not ask him when Ebersole was a Commission witness when he testified to the medial panel of the House assassins committee, as I report in as yet unpublished NEVER AGAIN! Ebersole was in the autopsy room when Friday night, between 10 and 11, he heard Humes phone Perry. (That this was suppressed and the transcript was not published by that committee is merely one of the reasons I refer to it as "The House assassins committee." Under the tight control of its chief counsel and staff director Robert Blakely, it suppressed this fact of the greatest possible significance in any honest investigation.)

It is because as Humes told Perry, the autopsy was going to say the opposite of what Perry saw and knew to be true that Perry had to make himself scarce. Otherwise he would have been involved in a great national scandal of unimaginable magnitude. With the possible ruin of his career and federal retaliation against Parkland Hospital on whose staff he was when federal money was dispensed. One way or more Perry's excellent reputation would have been ruined. And as of the day after the assassination he had every reason to believe he would be called upon to testify under oath at Oswald's trial.

If any reporter who read the Clark testimony in the Commissions' appended volumes or in my book remembered what he had confirmed when Perry said it, that the wound in the front of the neck was from the front, he should have perceived immediately that the contradiction was fundamental and that if Clark was truthful the entire Report was in jeopardy and Humes was a perjurer. Many reporters read my book. So I am inclined to believe that the media did not want that scandal.

What a scandal that would have been, too. Beginning with that the military pathologist in charge of the autopsy performed on the President perjured himself in his testimony about it and under oath his three assistants agreed with all he had testified to. If to that is added only the fact that he had decided (if not told) what the autopsy report would conclude before a proper autopsy examination could be made and then told Perry so that Perry would not disagree with him publicly, can the magnitude of the scandal if that had been reported would have been? Unprecedented in our history!

It is not easy to believe that there was no such story because every reporter in the country is a dope -- doesn't know a hot story when he sees one.

Because all of the media is not controlled by the government the only other possible explanation is that at every media component where this simple enormous scandal was recognized as a possibility decided to behave as the German media behaved under Hitler or that of the Soviets under Stalin.

So, in this simple illustration alone we had a President assassinated and that crime was not solved, intended not to be solved.

It was not solved because the government decided not to investigate the crime itself and then lied about it and because the media went along with that.

Which is to say sent along with the coup d'etat.

I use this of the many possible examples of the media not intending to fulfill its Constitutional role, all those examples a benefit to those who were the assassins, because very early on, not later than December 2, only 11 days after the assassination, the FBI had begun to leak its conclusions. Who is to say what its director that nobody ever contradicted and survived had ordained the day of the assassination. It leaked what it had in the special report ordered of it by President Johnson the night of the assassination, its five-volume report that is the Commission's first numbered file, CD1. The FBI said and the Commission later said that all the shots were from the back, where Oswald allegedly was.

That the media did not remember back less than two weeks to what all reported, that the Dallas doctors has said one shot was from the front and thus impossible for Oswald in the back of the President, made all that followed possible.

"Cui bono?"

The assassins.

Chapter 7: How Wild is "The Wild Blue Yonder"?

In this book to here, in the FBI's assassination investigation and in that of the Warren Commission the Navy got little attention. It deserves much more attention, as it did when it did not get that attention in the investigation.

The Navy did make its Oswald records available to the FBI as soon as Oswald was arrested. The two-page FBI report I have on that discloses nothing of any special interest and it does not report that Oswald had any, even the lowest, security clearance.

Sure, the Navy made its Oswald personnel records available to the Commission, and sure, it sent Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur G. Folsom, head of the Marine's Records Branch's personnel department to testify (Whitewash, pages 24-5) and to provide a written statement "by direction of the Commandment of the Marine Corps" to attest to the fact that as a Marine Oswald was "a rather poor 'shot'." (Whitewash, page 30, printed in facsimile.) This is quite the opposite of the very basis of the Report, so the Report ignored it.

The Navy also gave the Commission a copy of the cable it sent the Moscow embassy as soon as it got word of Oswald's alleged "defection." That report states that there was no security clearance indicated on Oswald's records but it was possible he could have held the lowest of security clearances, "confidential."

But there is so much more that the Navy should have provided the Commission and that it did not provide -- still to this day keeps entirely secret. There also is what the Navy did not do either at the time of that staged "defection" in which Oswald did not defect or at the time he was accused as the assassin.

On its part the Commission, meaning both its Members and its staff that brags of being only honorable men who did all they could have done as the Commission's counsels, failed to demand of the Navy what they knew the Navy was withholding from them, was keeping secret from them and from their investigation and from the people whose President was assassinated.

As a result questions remain unasked and unanswered about the Navy.

One obvious explanation is that no official wanted those questions asked or answered. Another is that the Navy had its own reasons for suppressing what the investigations needed that the Navy had and knew the investigations required for an honest and full investigation.

Oswald was a Marine. The Marines are part of the Navy. Thus, when Oswald went through the motions of defecting to the USSR but was careful not to do it, the primary investigation was by the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence. What is known of its so-called investigation would get it flunking grades in a phony mail-order course in private detectiving.

Oswald learned to read, write and speak Russian fluently when he was in the Marines. There is no record reflecting how he was able to do that -- or of any investigation of it.

He received allegedly Communist literature openly in the mail, which is handled and distributed by other Marines, and despite the open discussion of that and that despite this being well known he had only sensitive assignments as a Marine. There was no investigation of that, either.

As I brought to light in my 1967 Oswald in New Orleans (pages 85ff) Marines who were his friends and who knew him well were never spoken to. Not when he "defected" and not after he was accused of assassinating the President.

Not by the ONI. Not by the FBI or the Secret Service. And not by those so honorable men, the Commission's counsels.

Yet when he "defected" and the chief of Naval operations cabled our Moscow embassy about him, that cable stated that while the Oswald records show no security clearance for him he could have held the lowest of security clearance, CONFIDENTIAL, and there was no investigation of what he would have told the USSR.

Nor was there any FBI or Commission investigation of why the Navy's records were not complete or were withheld, kept secret from them.

When he was charged with being the Presidential assassin, the FBI examined Oswald's Navy personnel file. Its report, which says it holds all that is significant, makes no mention at all of any security clearance. The Commission's honorable men were honorable enough to accept this without question. My copy is from their file. They knew he held a high clearance.

As I also brought to light in Oswald in New Orleans, it was the testimony of many of the Marines who served with him that Oswald held "at least" a SECRET clearance. Aside from the enlisted men who worked with him, the commissioned officer under whom he did his classified work, in an outfit of which the entire Marines Corps had only five and in which all held some degree of classification, ticked off these secrets with which the Marines, meaning the Navy, trusted Oswald:

. . . we received word that he had showed up in Moscow. This necessitated a lot of change of aircraft call signs, codes, radio frequencies, radar frequencies. He had access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units' radio and radar . . . .

(Quoted from Oswald in New Orleans, pages 93-4, from the Commission testimony of John E. Donovan who was the captain under whom Oswald worked in their special radar unit that sometimes was in a van that would be placed on the deck of a carrier.)

Here Commission lawyer John Hart Ely interrupted to ask:

You recall that various codes were changed. Now, at what level were these changed: Was this an action of your specific unit, or a fairly widespread action?

Mr. Donovan: Well, I did not witness the changing in any other squadrons, but it would have to be, because the code is obviously between two or more units. Therefore, the other units had to change it. These codes are a grid, and two lines correspond . . . There are some things which he knew on which he received instruction that there is no way of changing, such as the MPS 16 height-finder radar gear. That had recently been integrated into the Marine Corps system. It had a height-finding range far in excess of our previous equipment, and it has certain limitations. He had been schooled on those limitations. It cannot operate above a given altitude in setting -- in other words, you cannot place the thing above a given terrain height. He had also been schooled on a piece of machinery called a TPX-1, which is used to transfer radio-radar and radio signals over a great distance. Radar is very susceptible to homing missiles, and this piece of equipment is used to put your radar antenna several miles away, and relay the information back to your site which you hope is relatively safe. He had been schooled on this. And that kind of stuff you cannot change.

Mr. Ely: Did Oswald have any kind of clearance?

Mr. Donovan: He must have had secret clearance to work in the radar center, because that was a minimum requirement for all of us (8H297-8).

None of this shows in any Commission record it got from the Navy or from the FBI or in any of the many FBI records I obtained through FOIA that it did not give the Commission.

This does not reflect an investigation. It is what I described it as in the title of the first series of my books, a Whitewash and in the subtitled of my second book as a "Cover-Up."

The Marine friend of Oswald who wanted anonymity because he was afraid he would otherwise suffer retaliation to whom I refer above as never having been spoken to by the ONI or any other official investigator, also told me that Oswald held a CRYPTO security clearance and was one of only five men in that entire outfit with that very high clearance. A prerequisite for it was having been cleared for TOP SECRET. I was able to confirm this.

The only man accused of killing the President, the Navy's commander-in-chief, held these high Navy security clearances and the Navy kept that secret from all investigations, including its own?

When I sought Oswald information from the Navy I drew a complete blank. Not a page did I get. So after letting a little time elapse, I made a different request, for the results of the court-martial inquest into the death of Marine PFC Martin Schrand. Schrand was one of the five men in that outfit who got his basic and his advanced radar training with Oswald and who performed the same duties inside that van he was guarding when he killed himself at Cubi Point in the Philippines.

To even set foot inside that van required these top security clearances.

For less than $10.00, for $9.65 I got the results of that inquest. That investigation, of Schrand's death, does establish the clearances required for that work.

My lead on this was the lead that set Warren Commission counsel Albert Jenner, who then was a candidate for the presidency of the American Bar Association, off in excitement to obtain the records I got later. Jenner was excited about it because a couple of those undereducated Marines, anxious to help the government, suggested to him that Oswald might have killed Schrand. That the Commission would have loved, an Oswald history of violence. It got not one but two sets of the records I got later from the Navy.

But do not look for it in the Commission's Report or in its 26 volumes of evidence of an officially estimated 10,000,000 words. In all those words, in all those 27 large volumes, there is not a mention of this. Those "honorable men" kept it secret. Oswald did not kill Schrand so what the hell difference did it make that the man charged with killing the President of the United States of America held as a Marine these exceptionally high security clearances? It made no difference at all to those so honorable men, the Commission's counsels. They were as honorable as their job required.

Neither the Marines nor the Navy gave this information to the Commission but it did give the Commission and the Commission published a great amount of information that included some of Oswald's training and assignments -- without mention of these exceptional security clearances.

But thanks to Jenner's and lust to pin a bum rap on Oswald to help make him appear to be a man of violence and thus more likely to have been an assassin, the Commission did learn of these security clearances -- and conducted no investigation of them at all. Is there not a limit to how much honor can be expected when a President is assassinated?

No, there will not be a new Marines anthem beginning "From the Halls of Montezuma to the vans of whitewash," with reference to "our country's honor" remaining in the proud song.

This came to mind when I read Dal's letter quoting his friend whose father had been a high officer in our Navy. So also did the shock I still remembered after 60 years when on a train I was joined by a former high-school classmate then at Annapolis. That was after Hitler took power, after he had started tearing Europe up but before World War II broke out openly. This uniformed Navy man in training at Annapolis to become the Navy officer he did become was entirely unlike the fine, friendly and peaceable boy I'd known in high school. He was animated in holding forth with what he had not learned in high school and had been taught at Annapolis. He was enthusiastically all for Hitler. And he was fairly drooling as he spoke about how anxious he and his mates were to get into a war with the USSR and beat the hell out of those bastards! Hitler had the right idea.

Sixty years later the country had a televised view of the kind of officer turned out at Annapolis -- not typical of all of them, of course, but an example like that of my high-school friend -- when Oliver North testified before the United States Senate. To many Americans that made him a hero, that testimony and how he then deported himself.

He lectured the Senate on how much he loved his country and how he had manifested his love, about the Constitution and how he loved that, too, and about how loyal an American and Navy officer he was.

What North actually did was to perjure himself, to flaunt and violate the Constitution, our laws, our treaties and international obligations, what when I was a young were regarded as neigh to sacred. In his boasting of his outstanding patriotism and as he also portrayed it, his self- sacrifice, and what he was really doing was boasting about his knowing violation of all he had sworn to uphold. He did violate laws and the Constitution about which he lectured the committee and for his boasting of that he became a national hero.

He even accused the Senate of leaking what he testifies was an important national- defense-secret -- and thus he had to keep secrets from the Senate. That so offended Newsweek, to which North personally had done that leaking, that it violated confidence and published the truth, that North had leaked that "national defense" secret to it, not the Senate he blamed for it on coast-to-coast TV and to its face.

During all this polite-worded tirade and attack on all basic American principles the august Senate was for all practical purposes mute. He violations were not ticked off to him, to his face and so the people of the country could understand them rather than make a hero of him.

However, with the light tap of a feather on North's wrist the Senate disclosed that he had taken gratuities.

In all of this North was guided and helped by his arrogant lawyer to whom the Senators, all of them present at those hearings, extended exceptional courtesies so he could make them all look bad and North look good. Normally the only role a lawyer can have before a committee is to advise his client. Committees are not like courts of law and the lawyer does not have either the responsibilities or the rights of lawyers before the courts.

But not Brendan Sullivan. He lectured the Senators, he interrupted them -- he put on quite a show, with more than the mere tolerance of those Senators. Sullivan also emerged a hero to a segment of the country.

Sullivan was of the Edward Bennett Williams law firm.

And when all those widespread violations were going on, Williams spent years on the president's intelligence advisory board supposedly providing "oversight."

Small world? As I write this North is the Republican candidate for Senator in Virginia with access to more people and money in record-breaking volume flooding in from all over the country to help him take another oath to support and uphold the Constitution and our laws despite his public record of either not understanding and violating them after this Annapolis education or intending to violate them if he did understand them.

During the Republican primary which he won easily North denied he had been convicted of anything and said he had been acquitted. He knew this was a lie. He was convicted. The conviction was not reversed on appeal. Instead the case was thrown out, the conviction still intact, on a technicality. That technicality did not undo the conviction or reverse it in any way. The technicality was that the prosecution might have used some of North's Senate committee testimony for which he had been granted immunity. North had invoked the Fifth Amendment not to testify. That is what those of his political views had been condemning all others for doing from the time of the beginning of the official Red-hunting in this country beginning after World War I. But when their like-minded Oliver North invoked the Fifth Amendment they worshipped him for it.

As Robert Macfarlane, retired Marine, full Colonel and North's superior on the National Security Council said when his book (Special Trust, Cadell & Davies) appeared shortly after the beginning of the campaign, North has trouble telling the truth and this and an unexplained psychiatric record assured that he would go no higher in the Marines. It has also been recommended that he be removed from the White House and returned to the Marines, but that did not happen, apparently because despite his liabilities the Marines preferred for him to be at the White House.

During the primary Ronald Reagan made a statement supporting North's opponent and condemning North as a liar but even the halo around that former President's head was not enough to influence those who had come to love North over his violations of the laws and of the Constitution. Not because they understood that is what he did but because they just regarded him as a hero for going before the Senate, resplendent in his uniform, and telling the Senate off. That he told it off in lies did not matter. That he was the tough guy who did that did matter to the uninformed who did not understand that and did not want to understand anything else. Nor did it register on them that the Senate was investigating illegalities by the Reagan White House staff and others and if the President could be shown to have had knowledge of it, that could have been an impeachable offense. The offenses -- North's offenses, were that serious.

For this the Senate should be told off? This is the stuff of heroism? This is what justifies all that money rolling in to make a hero of a man who heartily violated law and constitution and to impose him on the country in the Senate of the United States?

My critical comments on North, in the sense of the kind of officers Annapolis has turned out, are mild compared to what the Wall Street Journal's Washington Bureau chief Albert R. Hunt said about him in the October 6, 1994 issue, when the campaign for the Virginia Senate seat had a month to go. Hunt's "Politics & People" column is headed, also gently compared to what Hunt wrote, "Mythomania: Ollie North's Incurable Problem." The Journal is a conservative paper written for conservative readers and with conservative ownership. Hunt's sources are Republicans, what North claims to be, Marines who served with North, or both.

It has a box headed "Lies, Damned Lies and Ollie North." It consists of a list of "former associates who have said that Oliver North is not truthful." Those listed are President Reagan, in whose White House North served; Reagan's Secretary of State, George Schultz; Reagan's Secretary of Defense; Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's first National Security Director under whom North worked; the retired Marine colonel Robert MacFarlane; Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State of Inter-American Affairs, Elliot Abrams; and Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, James Webb. Webb also was at Annapolis when North was. Nancy Reagan is among the other Republicans who castigated North as a habitual liar.

While Hunt's catalogues of North's inability to tell the truth even by accident is far from complete, there being only so much space in a newspaper column, it is a remarkable indictment because of the sources on which it draws, Republican sources that while far from complete in cataloguing North's inability to be truthful, are all on the side of the party whose nomination he won.

North regaled campaign audiences with the entirely false story that his grandfather was an immigrant who had to work the indenture off when a Norfolk businessman paid his passage to the United States. This was not only illegal and did not happen but the man who brought North's grandfather here was his uncle.

Right after making headlines saying that the Confederate flag should be flown North tried to lie out of it pretending he had not said what he had made it a point to say, to attract that part of the Neanderthal political spectrum in a close race.

Hunt repeats what I say about North's lie, that he had not been convicted when in fact he was.

Hunt then quotes a Reader's Digest article, and it also is a conservative publication, "Does Oliver North Tell the Truth?" It quotes more than a dozen all in high positions as saying he lied about everything and "cannot be trusted to tell the truth -- in speech, in print, about Iran-Contra or much else."

He even lies about his career in Vietnam, saying he served there longer than he did and in a higher rank that he had.

A Marine colonel who had also been an Annapolis with North, Colonel John McKay, said of North, "with him there has never been any clear definition as to what is fact and what is fantasy."

The former Secretary of the Navy who was at Annapolis with North, in Hunt's words, "is incensed at what he calls 'Ollie's deliberate inaccuracies regarding his military service'. "Deliberate inaccuracies" is a polite way of saying deliberate lies.

Even among "ardent champions of the Nicaraguan Contras' North claimed to be dedicated to helping Hunt quotes a member of ultra-conservative Senator Jesse Helms' staff who was "a key supporter of the Contras" as "fuming" because North forced those Contras "to buy weapons at inflated prices," with many of those weapons "defective" and as saying "that the so-called diversion from the Iranian sales never got to" those Contras.

When North said of President Reagan, who had already called him a liar in an atypical intrusion into the Virginia campaign, that he did not take Iran-Contra advice from North and others, MacFarlane, under whom North worked in that office, said that North gave no such advice, "at no point did North even express opposition to the Iranian initiative" as that White House fiasco was referred to within the Reagan administration.

General Brent Showcroft, who was a member of the Tower commission that investigated that scandal, confirmed MacFarlane on this.

Even though Reagan called North a liar for talking about the many private meetings North claims to have had with him, even North's campaign aides admit privately, Hunt's words, that North "still tells stories about the one-on-one sessions he had with President Reagan." As Reagan said is confirmed by his confidant , Michael Deaver, says it "just didn't happen."

After reporting North's lying about his opponent's record in Vietnam, a distinguished combat record, Hunt concludes:

"But Mr. North's pattern of duplicity is too pervasive to chalk it up to political hyperbole. And interviews with a score of former colleagues, from the military and the Reagan administration suggest instead that many who know him best are horrified that Oliver North seems headed for the U.S. Senate . . . . They oppose him because having known and worked closely with Oliver North they believe he is a liar."

That so many of this opinion were at Annapolis with North reflects the fact that all the officers Annapolis educates and turns out are not Oliver Norths. But that is where he got his education and began his military career that the Navy could have ended at any time but instead kept promoting him and then assigned him to his White House post despite knowing the kind of inveterate liar he is and the kinds of things of which he was capable.

I devote this attention to North because there are many other military officers like him; because he and they were educated in the military's academies; because aside from his dishonesties he represents the kind of thinking of many of those officers after their military educations; and because despite all of this criticism of him by Republicans and fellow Marines who knew him so well, the changes in national thinking since President Kennedy was assassinated are such that he could only become a serious candidate for the United States Senate, unprecedented as this criticism of him is in volume and character, he was as of the time I write this running neck-and- neck with the incumbent Democrat, son-in-law of President Johnson and himself an honored Marine with an exemplary combat record.

For those who loved him, the truth about North made no difference at all, they still loved him, nonstop liar that he was; they still wanted him to represent them in the United States Senate.

This does represent a political change in the country the significance of which is not easily exaggerated.

Of course neither North nor my high school friend typify all Navy officers or all what they learn at Annapolis. But they do represent what kind of officer who can and do can come out of the Navy's best-known educational institute at which it prepares its officers to serve their country and to uphold its Constitution and its laws.

There is no question, the Norths and those others like my former high-school friend are dedicated and sincere. It is just that the basic principles of this country are foreign to them and they believe sincerely in the opposite of what our American beliefs are. Sincere in their beliefs, they are no less sincere when they did what they do. From North's Senate testimony there is virtually nothing of which they are not capable if they regard it as in the national interest as they see the national interest, that is.

Like killing the strong who will not break?

My friend of high-school days was indoctrinated by the Navy at Annapolis more than half a century ago. North emerged from it with similar beliefs several decades later. There are more recent demonstrations of the Annapolis reality, the more things change the more they remain the same. This is illustrated by a number of nasty, some really sordid Navy scandals of recent years. These involved the most senior and the more junior Navy officers, Annapolis graduates, and midshipmen, student officers getting their Navy educations in the Navy's most prestigious educational institution. We find some of these truly exceptional scandals high-command beliefs and attitudes are the standards set by those of highest rank for the younger commissioned officers and for the young and impressionable midshipmen trained, educated -- and indoctrinated -- to led the Navy in the future.

One of these scandals was the massive and unprecedented physical abuse of a very large number of women Navy officers at a "Tailgate" gathering in Nevada, at hotel. The Navy men chased and caught them when they fled, pawed them and manhandled them however and wherever they could -- and this in public, in a hotel.

Then there was the disastrous explosion on a battleship. The Navy sought to wipe that and responsibility for the resultant deaths out by falsely attributing it to the alleged homosexual jealousy of a sailor it named -- meaning blamed. In the end it had to retract this baseless accusation. But the top brass had no qualms about what it tried to get away with.

The Navy also fired a missile at and downed an on-time, regularly-scheduled Iranian civilian airliner which had just taken off from its Iranian airport killing several hundred innocent civilians.

Annapolis itself became embroiled in a scandal also of unprecedented proportions involving its cherished and boast-of "Honor Concept." By the time the Navy's top brass finished trying to cover that up and exonerating the guilty it had magnified the scandal into nation-wide proportions and ruined the lives of many innocents. In the course of this demonstration of the "Honor Concept" by and at the instigation of the admirals perjury was commonplace, as was the threat of violence against witnesses and attempts to implement them. Many officials systematically and forcefully denied witnesses their supposedly imperishable American rights in the Navy's successful effort to see to it that those prominent in Annapolis sporting events and those with the right family connections were exculpated, regardless of how clearly guilty they were.

The October, 1994 issue of Esquire has a detailed and definitive exposure of this Annapolis demonstration of what it and the Navy itself practice in indoctrinating those who ware to rise to the Navy's top command. Pope Brock's article is titled, The Extremes of Honor. Its descriptive subtitle is, the cheating scandal that rocked the Naval Academy was nothing compared with the horrors of the investigation that followed.

The Annapolis Honor Concept is, " Midshipmen are persons of integrity. They do not cheat, lie or steal."

Annapolis has an Honor Brigade. It also has an Honor Staff, honor is a big thing at Annapolis. As Brock quotes Richard L. Armitage, the chairman of a board that after this scandal studied the Honor Concept, the "midshipmen are far more idealistic when they arrive at the Naval Academy than when they leave." Brock adds, "A major reason is the ruthless way that integrity has often been taught there."

Involved was the class of 1994. It all began December 11, 1992, when a member of that class paid $5,000 to a civilian in the copying center for a copy of the final exam in a tough course, Electrical Engineering 311. The Navy has not disclosed the name of the midshipmen with whom it all began. He started selling access to that exam then only three days away. Then his customers started selling the exam. Rapidly the contents of the exam, as Brock reports, "had penetrated twenty-nine of the thirty-six companies living in Bancroft" Hall. That old building, the largest college dormitory in the country, has almost five miles of corridors and it houses the entire student brigade.

Before the December 14, 1992 test, there were few who took it who were not well prepared to pass it. Soon it was no secret at all that the exam was out and the questions known before the test was taken.

One of those who talked and whose life was ruined by it said, "I know a majority of varsity" in that class who were "football players had the exam." Brock writes that "enmeshed" were "133 midshipmen, including the class president, the captains of half a dozen varsity teams, and member of the '94 Honor Staff." One of the exonerated sports luminaries was a football halfback who was the son of the Annapolis classmate of Admiral Thomas Lynch, Naval Academy superintendent and a friend of the Superintendent's son.

As the secretary of the Honor Brigade Brendon Dibella later told Navy investigators, Brock says, "there were conspiracies of lying, bribes and threats . . . obvious collusion on the part of the accused" and it succeeded "because faculty advisors drastically curtailed testimony and refused to pursue leads . . . Censorship of the evidence plagued the" investigating board.

The Pentagon Inspection General investigated. It began by "scaring the hell out of everybody . . . . Soon horror stories were pouring out" of the rooms in which the interrogations were conducted. One affidavit filed in court accused the investigators of telling witnesses that "had no rights at all." The IG's people "screamed and cursed" and banged the tables. One midshipmen, Justin Jones-Lantzy, who had not cheated but who had refused to squeal on his roommate, said he was told "we can keep you here forever." He replied, "Why don't you hook me up to the electric shock? It would be much quicker."

On of the few women midshipmen caught up in the scandal attested in an affidavit that "The investigators asked questions regarding my personal life . . . . put up a picture of my boyfriend" and "asked me personal questions about" him. When she tried to leave to get a lawyer they "yelled at me and told me that I could not leave. I felt intimidated."

Jones-Lantzy, who wound up testifying, said that "backstabbing became rampant." For a while he "was really scared for my life." He had been threatened and shortly after the verdicts, while driving on a highway near Annapolis, "Four football players in a 4x4 came up behind me. They were moving in on me from the right . . . trying to run me off the road." He slammed his brakes on, they passed him and he got way. He identified all four in that truck as cheaters, of whom three survived and would graduate.

Ultimately, of the more than 100 involved, eleven cases were sent to Admiral Leahy's deputy. Of the four he cleared, one was the football player whose father had gone to Annapolis with Leahy. He was not hurt by being good friends with Leahy's son.

Jones-Lantzy, the youngster who told the truth and was not cheated, was expelled. In all 29 expulsions were recommended by the board that looked into the scandal. It was headed by Admiral Richard Allen. Their recommendation was forwarded to the chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso II. At that very time he was negotiating his own early retirement because he had been involved in the "Tailhook" coverup. As Brock writes, Kelso had "steadfastly denied he had been on the hotel floor where the mauling of the women had occurred, even though more than thirty witnesses had placed him there." He, with this record, was judging the integrity of the midshipmen.

In the end, a total of twenty-four were expelled. When Admiral Lynch announced the expulsions he was hooted at when he said that no football players were involved. When he denied that he had been visited by that football halfback the night before his case was to be heard he was greeted by the assembled corps of midshipmen with snickering and hooting. That football halfback was quoted as saying, "They weren't going to get rid of me."

Of the more than a hundred the Navy did "get rid of" only 24, no stars among them.

For other minor offenses leading to expulsion for violating the "Honor Concept." Like a man who used a fake identification to get into a bar; a woman who reported her weight at six pounds less than it was; and the middy who, on seeing a pretty girl looking for her boyfriend, told her he wasn't available and took her for a milkshake.

And so justice was done, Navy style, at Annapolis.

The ultimate judgment was by the admiral who was made a perjurer himself by more than thirty witnesses.

The offenses of more than a hundred who were not expelled were, by Navy standards, obviously much less serious, much less a violation of that code of "honor" that using false identification to sneak in a drink, or underestimating weight by six pounds, or taking someone else's girlfriend for a milkshake.

This -- and how to get away with it -- is the learning experience, the indoctrination, of the more than 4000 middies then at Annapolis and for the many thousands more far into the future.

This is the Navy's indoctrination of those who are to lead it on what is right and what is wrong.

It is powerful, effective teaching. It is what need be remembered for success in a Navy career.

My friend Dal has a friend also an educator, whose father was Annapolis educated and rose to a fairly high rank in the Navy. After commands at sea his last shore assignment was with Admiral Thomas Moorer at the Navy's large Norfolk, Virginia base. It is just down the Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis, where the bay enters the Atlantic ocean. The father told his son that if the military were involved in the JFK assassination, he would pick the Navy as the branch of the service most likely to be behind it.

The father had an immediate interest in the assassination and read all he could find about it, including my books. He had his suspicions about the assassination and about the Navy, in which he spent his life, because he regarded it as the most conservative of the military services politically and probably more inclined to believe that assassinating JFK would be an act of patriotism.

Dal's letter reminded my of my high-school friend and how Annapolis had influenced his thinking; of the book I researched but did not write, Tiger to Ride; the high Navy officers who deliberately violated the President' orders, which they would do only if they regarded his orders to be against the nation's interest, knowing that they did could lead to war; and of the suspicions required by what the Navy did and did not do when it made so incredible a mess of that autopsy; of the Navy's burning of the written autopsy as soon as it knew that Oswald had been killed and there would be no trial at which that autopsy would be examined and cross-examined; of the high- level and substantive Navy changes made in the second autopsy after it was written, which I had brought to light; and of the fact that Navy officers had perjured themselves over this.

I was reminded, too, of what is in my NEVER AGAIN! about all the Navy did that was so very wrong in and about that autopsy, even blaming the victim's survivors for what they did not do in that autopsy that their own regulations required them to do, as also any regard for their obligations did, their obligations to the nation in particular.

Any understanding of what is to be done at any autopsy in a crime of violence and any understanding of the Navy testimony to the Warren Commission created at the least a strong suspicion of Navy involvement in the assassination. Why else would it do and not do what it did and then lie under oath about it?

Chapter 8: How Many Lives Did Oswald Lead -- Herbert Philbrick's Three?

When we consider what is known about Oswald, particularly about his beliefs, and what was so consistently misrepresented about him and his beliefs, both officially and in most of the literature, particularly the literature in support of the official assassination mythology, the lack of official attention to the Navy and the information it withheld become more provocative.

Almost as soon as Oswald was arrested he was proclaimed to be a "Red." This was begun by the since disbanded 112th Army Intelligence component based at San Antonio, Texas. It immediately gave this supposed information out, including to the Dallas police by phone. From then on Oswald was branded in the public mind as a "Red" or as a "Marxist", both taken to be what he was widely called, a Communist. That he never was. He was always anti-Communist, a fact hidden in the official records and always misstated in most of the literature, in all the sycophantic literature.

Although a high-school dropout and one who never had a good record as a student, Oswald was comparatively well read, particularly in political matters. I brought much of this to light only to have it ignored in my first book. I put it this way because that was the first book on the Warren Commission. So from the time of the first book that Oswald as an anti-Communist rather than a Communist was public knowledge. (Whitewash, pages 121-2.) Albeit not to the media or to any of those who write in support of the false official assassination solution.

As a sixteen-year old Oswald pretended to be sympathetic to, at the same time, both the Young Peoples Socialist League of the Socialist party and the Socialist Workers party, or the Trotskyites. He also wrote the Communist Party pretending sympathy with it. It will not be easy to find two political parties of people who hated each other more than the Communists and the Trotskyites. Oswald could not have been sympathetic to both at the same time, even less at the same time to the Socialist Party, too.

The truth is, as I then wrote, that "Oswald's hatred of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union exude from 150 consecutive pages of his notes" in the Commission's appendix volume from which I had just quoted, "as well as from other exhibits" in the Commission's published record. (15H283-434)

The previous paragraph in Whitewash refers to the fact that Oswald, with his wife and some relatives, went to Battles Wharf, Alabama, where a cousin was in a seminary, where "he unburdened himself of his anti-Soviet feelings." He was then so anti-Soviet a priest who was present told him he would be more effective if he restrained himself a little.

That was after he returned from the Soviet Union.

The rest of that page reads:

. . . For example, in Exhibit 97 (pp. 422-3) he raged, "The Communist Party of the United States has betrayed itself! It has turned itself into the traditional lever of a foreign power to overthrow the government of the United States, not in the name of freedom or high ideals, but in servile conformity to the wishes of the Soviet Union . . . (the leaders) have shown themselves to be willing, gullible messengers of the Kremlin's Internationalist propaganda . . . The Soviets have committed crimes unsurpassed . . . imprisonment of their own peoples . . . mass extermination . . . the murder of history, the prostitution of art and culture. The communist movement in the U.S., personalized by the Communist Party, U.S.A., has turned itself into a 'valuable gold coin' of the Kremlin. It has failed to denounce any actions of the Soviet Government when similar actions of the U.S. Government bring pious protest." (Spelling improved.)

The Report quotes some of this as well as ". . . I hate the U .S.S.R. and Socialist system . . ." (R399).

He also described himself as one with "many personal reasons to know and therefore hate and mistrust Communism . . ." (16H442).

One of Oswald's more kindly references to the Soviet leaders was that they are, "fat, stinking politicians" rather than those interested in helping working people.

As a boy, as the Commission's published records, including its testimony reflect, his favorite TV program was Herbert Philbrick's "I Led Three Lives." Philbrick had become an FBI informer. His book about that and the TV show based on it were then popular. As a boy Oswald never missed even the reruns of that TV show, according to his brother's Commission testimony.

As a boy he longed to be the secret agent or a spy or at least the kind of lionized informer his TV hero, Philbrick, was. He started trying to practice this craft when he was a boy.

Oswald's favorite book, the Commission's record also shows, was, according to one of his under-educated friends in the Marines, an anti-Communist classic. This came to light in Commission Counsel Wesley Liebeler's questioning of Nelson Delgado. I published it in 1967, in Oswald in New Orleans. Delgado had just given Liebeler his recollection of what Oswald had told him about George Orwell's Animal Farm. Delgado did not remember its title:

Mr. Liebeler: Did you tell the FBI about this?

Mr. Delgado: Yes.

Mr. Liebeler: Did they know the name of the book?

Mr. Delgado: No.

Mr. Liebeler: The FBI did not know the name of the book?

Mr. Delgado: No.

Mr. Liebeler: It is called the Animal Farm. It is by George Orwell.

Mr. Delgado: He didn't tell me. I asked him for the thing, but he wouldn't tell me. I guess he didn't know. The Animal Farm. Did you read it?

Mr. Liebeler: Yes; there is only one thing that Oswald did not mention apparently and that is that the pigs took over the farm, and then they got to be just like the capitalists were before, they got fighting among themselves, and there was one big pig who did just the same thing that the capitalist had done before. Didn't Oswald tell you about that?

Mr. Delgado: No; just that the pigs and animals had revolted and made the farmer work for them. The Animal Farm. Is that a socialist book?

Mr. Liebeler: No.

Mr. Delgado: That is just the way you interpret it; right?

Mr. Liebeler: Yes; I think so. It is actually supposed to be quite an anti- Communist book.

Mr. Delgado: Is it really?

Mr. Liebeler: Yes.

(Page 98)

So in addition to some of what I brought to public attention in 1965, this is what I brought to public attention in 1967 along with his high Marine security clearances.

A simply enormous amount of Oswald information was withheld on the spurious claim to a "national security" need to do that. As I write this what was compelled to be released under the 1992 law requiring all assassination information to be disclosed is being examined by others. This includes what was described to me as a great volume of CIA information. But in earlier years bits and pieces were rescued from their official oblivion. I reported what the defected KGB agent Yuri Nosenko told the FBI about Oswald when it interviewed Nosenko in early 1964. Nosenko offered to testify before the Warren Commission. The CIA talked it out of listening to him. Here is how I brought to light some of the little then newly available in my 1975 Post Mortem:

Suppressing fact and truth was an early, major and endless problem. On the reality of Oswald, its confrontation with unwanted proof began 2/4/64 when a former KGB deputy section chief, Yuri Nosenko, defected to the CIA. Nosenko had had custody of the KGB's entire Oswald file.

With his life at stake if he lied, Nosenko talked. His story checked out. There is no mention of him or what he disclosed in the report. Total suppression. I have obtained hundreds of relevant pages, seek more and will be writing about this separately. Nosenko told the CIA (not one report from which can be found in the Commission's files) and the FBI that the Russians actually believed Oswald was a "sleeper" or "dormant" American agent and had him and his mail under surveillance all the time he was in the USSR. Despite this, Oswald did not hide his dislike of the USSR. Marina's uncle, a colonel, begged Oswald "not to be too critical of the Soviet Union when he returned to the United States."

The Commission and its witting staff had to hide all of this. Then they and the Commission's successors have perpetuated secrecy to the degree possible.

The CIA could not deny the FBI access to Nosenko. FBI agents known to have interviewed him are Maurice A. Taylor, Donald E. Walter and Alekso Popanovich, beginning 2/26. The wily Hoover, knowing it would embarrass and compromise both the CIA and the Commission, arranged without being asked for Nosenko to offer to testify, the last thing the Commission wanted, and then put it in a letter.

The CIA people involved were under James Angleton, who, with others of them, was forced out as a result of the Watergate scandals. Typical of the continuing suppression is the withholding of the paragraph from David Slawson's 3/12/64 "TOP SECRET" memo on a CIA conference: "The first topic of conversation was Yuri Nosenko, the recent Soviet defector. A general discussion was held on this problem [sic] with the CIA's recommendation being that the Commission await further developments."

"Await" is the right word. The CIA stonewalled successfully. As of October 1975 I "await" response under the law to months-old requests for declassification of what never qualified for any classification, what Nosenko told the CIA about Oswald.

Slawson's colleague in this work is Ford's Secretary of Transportation, William T. Coleman, Jr. Then they put "TOP SECRET" classification on what the FBI did not classify at all and suppressed it all from their part of the Report.

It is a big secret but on 6/24/64 the Commission actually had Nosenko study some of its Oswald files. The day before it held an executive session. After not being able to get that transcript for eight years I filed suit on 9/24/75 (C.A. 75- 1448). Also on 6/24 this same pair wrote and classified TOP SECRET a memo to "The Commission" that begins by justifying their not questioning Nosenko, making no mention of the prior day's events of Nosenko's willingness to testify:

The Commission has asked us to prepare a short memorandum outlining in what respects the information obtained from Nosenko confirms or contradicts information we have from other sources.

Nosenko's testimony to the FBI is the only information we have on what he knows about Lee Harvey Oswald. (Commission Documents No. 434 and 451.) Perhaps more useful information could be gained if we were to question Nosenko directly, but it is unlikely. Nosenko told the representative of the FBI who questioned him that he had given all the information on Oswald he possessed.

Then they say Nosenko's only important knowledge was that Oswald was not a KGB agent. That he was suspected by the Russians of being an American agent was not important!

There can be no more classic example of Hoover's daring and expertise in his own special brand of "dirty tricks." His unsolicited offer of Nosenko as a witness shifted all possible Commission interest away from Hoover and reports Oswald had worked for him. Hoover put his monkey on the Commission and CIA backs. The Commission saw irreparable destruction of its whole fabrication. The CIA knew Dulles told the Commission the FBI had no agents in Russia (p. 481; WHITEWASH IV, pp. 74-5) (quoted from pages 627-8)

Whether or not Oswald ever had any connection with any intelligence operation of any kind cannot be stated with certainty from the official records not still kept secret. But from the outset, what was known of Oswald as a boy and after he returned from the Soviet Union did raise questions about this possibility. As I write in my first book, Oswald's career in New Orleans after his return from the Soviet Union is consistent with what in intelligence is called establishing a cover. As I also write of him in that 1965 book:

Even his oft-mentioned notes on Russian, widely discussed but unquoted in the press, are a narrative full of the kind of information intelligence agencies, including our own, seek about other countries, especially the Soviet Union. It includes such items as the location of an airport, the layout of a city, and all sorts of intimate details of the electronics factory in which he worked, including what it produced, its rate of production, the number of employees engaged in various pursuits and other such non-travelogue data. (Page 123)

I use these few selections from what I published and was available to all (and I use what I published rather than what is in my files, although my files are also available to all who write in the field, along with the use of our copier) so the reader can know what was publicly available, what required no work, no days of poring over official records to learn and what did not require travelling to Washington to learn. This gives the reader a way of evaluating other books that often got simply enormous attention and at the same time evaluate the integrity or lack of integrity by the government agencies involved in the sad pretense of an investigation of the assassination of their President.

I did not and I here do not present this as proof that Oswald was some kind of agent. I use it to show that here was a basis, more than a suspicion, for that to have been investigated by the government no part of which ever did that.

There is more that is highly suspicious and got little or no attention. Some of this tracks back to the Navy's suppression of information it had to have, like what relates to Oswald's exceptionally high security clearances the fact of which remains an official secret as I write this.

Oswald obtained his "hardship"discharge by fraud. There is no question about it at all. Yet when he returned to the United States, the money advanced him by our government, by the State Department, the Marines, meaning the Navy, did not charge him with getting that discharge by fraud. Despite an open-and-shut case that he did.

As Oswald's pocket address book reflects, he had in it the name and address of the mother of the Army doctor assigned to the Moscow embassy as a doctor, Captain Alexi Davison. There is little less unlikely that Davison gave Oswald his mother's address so he could look her up if Davison, meaning the Embassy and the spooks in it of whom Davison was one, were not absolutely certain that Oswald was very strongly anti-Soviet.

Davison's Russian mother met his American father when she was a nurse in the anti- Communist Wrangel White Army fighting the revolutionists World-War-I time and his father was an American doctor with the American forces that were among those of six countries that then invaded what became the Soviet Union in an unsuccessful effort to defeat it militarily. Davison's mother was virulently anti-Soviet. Her son would not have offended her by sending her a visitor who was in favor of the Soviet Union.

Who was Captain Alexi Davison other than the doctor assigned to our Moscow embassy?

He was expelled by the Soviet Union for his espionage activities there. That was in the famous Penkovsky case. My files hold even Russian newspaper account of this. Davison was one of those caught "servicing" as the spooks refer to it what are called "dead drops," places in which spies like Penkovsky deposit what is to be picked up by those intelligence agents who "service" those "dead drops." Like a hollow in a tree or a discarded newspaper paper. Or a hole in a wall.

This is enough of a record of the real Oswald , not the supposed "Red" of the official mythologies, to return to the Navy and what it has kept secret, even from official investigations.

When Oswald, who was openly anti-Soviet when he was in the Soviet Union, wanted to return to the United States, he travelled to our Moscow embassy from Minsk, where the Soviet Red Cross established him in a job as a non-citizen, the Soviet Union having refused him citizenship. He there made it clear that while he wanted to return, he attached two conditions to it. One was that his wife, a Soviet citizen, accompany him and be admitted to the United States. The other is that he not be prosecuted for anything.

When Oswald went through the motions of defecting while being careful not to do that, he was seen by an attache named Richard E. Snyder. (Whitewash pages 124-5, 127, 132)

Right off the bat he told Snyder that he was going to give the Soviet all the secrets he knew about the Marines' special radar unit in which he had worked and whose secrets he really did have. On this basis alone there was at the least reason to question Oswald, and the additional need to determine whether a criminal charge of spying should be placed on him once he was back in the United States.

Then there is the fact that he did obtain his discharge by fraud.

The United States was anxious to get Oswald home. The records do not indicate why but they do reflect the fact. One obvious reason is to get an American citizen back. Another has to do with whether or not he gave military secrets away and if he did what those secrets were. Still another could be to learn from him what he had learned and observed in the USSR in those Cold War days.

The Soviet Union was anxious to get rid of him because he was suspected of being an American agent in place or "sleeper" agent, whether he went or he was sent there for that purpose.

So, the Soviet Union agreed for its citizen, Oswald's wife Marina, and their infant daughter to leave the USSR, and the State Department agreed to Oswald's demand that he not be prosecuted and that his wife and daughter be permitted to be admitted into the United States. Lending him the money was not that abnormal but the lack of State Department records relating to him and to denying him any future passport is suspicious. He did later get a passport. Faster than those who applied for it when he did. (Whitewash, pages 126, 130-1, 200)

This history indicates that the Navy had to have been consulted on any decision not to prosecute Oswald on his return for getting an early discharge by fraud and on whether or not to seek prosecution of him for disclosing military secrets. But the Navy never gave any such records to the Commission and in the hundreds of thousands of pages of its records that I got from the FBI there is not a single one relating to this. This also means that the FBI, fully aware of Oswald's record, did not demand those records of the Navy. But it is obvious that the State Department could not promise Oswald that he would not be prosecuted without having Department of Justice and Navy agreement. As, obviously, it did. This also is one of a number of reasons to wonder whether Oswald had some kind of connection with the ONI, the Navy's intelligence arm.

That Oswald had some connection with some agency was one of the earliest rumors about him. The one that first got attention is that he worked for the FBI. For a month after it was first published the Commission ignored that report, pretended it was not aware of it. Until it was told by the Texas State Attorney General Waggoner Carr that his Texas Court of Inquiry planned to look into it. The evening of the day Carr spoke to Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin, Rankin called a special nighttime executive session of the Warren Commission. At it the members let their hair down, confessed that in Rankin's words, "if it ever came out and could be established, then you would have people think that there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination that nothing this Commission could do or anybody could dissipate."

(Under FOIA I ultimately did obtain all the Commission's withheld executive session transcripts. All were classified TOP SECRET. There is not a thing in them that justified this classification or any classification at all. The only reason to keep them Secret was to prevent embarrassment. The law is specific in stating that under it this is not justification for withholding anything. I published this January 22, 1964 executive session transcript in facsimile in Post Mortem, pages 475 ff.) I published the transcript of the January 27 session, a followup on this one, also in facsimile in Whitewash IV, pages 36ff.)

The Commission's assigned duty was to investigate to establish the truth, not undertake to disprove there had been any conspiracy to kill the President.

If the Commission were to ask the FBI about it, the FBI they all, not without cause, did fear, "they could probably say -- that it isn't our business," Rankin also told the Members.

The FBI had already given the Commission to understand before that day, January 22, 1964, in Rankin's words "They have found the man. There is nothing more to do . . .and we can go home and that is the end of it."

This and more pretty hairy stuff, like their decision to destroy the record they were making even though at the outset they had decided that "we would have (stenographic) records of meetings" pursuant to which "we had called the (court) reporter in the formal way . . . ."

The Commission did believe that it had destroyed their record completely. It overlooked the stenotypist's tape and when I sued under FOIA for it the National Archives abandoned its stock "national security" claim and had the tape transcribed not by that court reporter but at the Pentagon and gave it to me.

This was the first of the Commission's TOP SECRET deliberations of the report that Oswald had worked for the FBI. It arranged in advance for there to be no court reporter at the next one two days later. There it heard from the Texas board. But there is no transcript of that session. I interviewed two of those Texans, dean emeritus of the SMU law school, Robert G. Storey, and the then Dallas District Attorney, my friend Henry Wade. Both were under the impression that a stenographer was taking it all down verbatim. Instead Rankin had a staff stenographer there pretending to do that. All that was recorded of what the Texans told him and Warren is what Rankin decided to include in a six-page memo.

The next executive session was that of January 27. Most of the Members were there and this time they had a stenographic transcript. It also was classified TOP SECRET and it also I had to sue to get. There is in it, as is true of them all, not a thing that warranted any classification. The sole and the usual purpose of classification was to suppress. I published Whitewash IV about that transcript and in it reproduced the entire transcript of 95 pages in facsimile. The large TOP SECRET stamps are on every page, top and bottom.

Commission Allen Dulles, who had headed the CIA, was asked by his fellow commissioners about official lying about such things. Dulles told them that anyone who knew about it would lie and that for him to lie would be proper, that "I wouldn't think he would tell it (the truth) under oath, no." (page 62) He added that he, personally, might not even tell the Secretary of Defense the truth (page 63). With regard to the report that Oswald worked for the FBI Dulles said, "I think under any circumstances, I think Mr. Hoover would say certainly he didn't have anything to do with this fellow," Oswald. (page 63)

But, Dulles, assured them, the FBI did not run agents in the USSR. The CIA did. Whether any other agency did was not discussed.

With a record being made but when they expected perpetual secrecy for that record, Rankin told the Members, "I don't see how the country is ever going to be willing to accept it if we don't satisfy them on this particular issue (of Oswald as an agent), not only with them (the FBI) but the CIA and every other agency." (page 58)

The Commission accepted self-serving pro forma denials from the heads of the FBI and the CIA and wiped it out that way. Which, of course, leaves the question still a question without any meaningful answer.

Commission Member Gerald Ford, to become our first unelected President, stole the transcript of this session and used it in his ghost-written commercialization of the assassination, Portrait of the Assassin (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966) At the Senate Judiciary hearing on Ford's appointment as vice president by Watergating President Richard Nixon, to succeed Spiro Agnew as vice president after Agnew had had to resign because of his own criminal activities, Ford swore that he had used nothing in his book that was not public. A decade later it was still classified TOP SECRET and withheld from me, it was that "public." In addition to resorting to perjury to get the committee's approval -- and all this is set forth in Whitewash IV, with the documentation -- Ford made changes in the transcript for his own political purpose. These included buttering up Hoover and the FBI and eliminating criticism of it. In Whitewash IV I follow the facsimile reproduction of that transcript with a word-for-word comparison of the actual transcript and the Ford version prepared for me by Dr. Paul Hoch, of Berkeley, California.

In the two decades since that book appeared I have had not a word of criticism and not a word from or on behalf of those I write about in it.

One of the sources of this report the Commission avoided looking into was then a reporter for the Houston Post, Alonzo Hudkins. Lonnie later became a friend of mine, after he left that paper and was working in Baltimore. Lonnie told me that the number the Commission used, S- 172, was one he and two associates made up in the belief the FBI was tapping their phones when they were working on this story. The Commission went out of its way not to call Hudkins as a witness. In fact, it did not even speak to him informally. Leon Jaworksi, later of fame as the Watergate special prosecutor, instead spoke to the Houston paper's executive vice president and executive editor, J.P. Hobby, Jr., asking him to get an affidavit from Hudkins denying the whole thing! (Whitewash IV, page 146, also in facsimile.)

But by then Lonnie was working for the Baltimore News-American.

Lonnie was open with me in all details of this business except one. He refuses to talk about the correct number.

The Commission knew the number Lonnie and friends made up was a phony but all of its pretense of an investigation is in terms of that phony number only. Never of the correct number, which it did have. But the Texans on November 24, 1964, told Rankin and Warren and Rankin included in his memo the fact that the actual number was 110669. This is not an FBI number. The FBI has its own system for numbering its informers. 110669 is consistent with CIA numbers. It may be consistent with other agency numbering systems.

Because when the President was killed there was never any real investigation and there was never intended to be one, there are no answers and this matter was never investigated.

With what the Commission knew about Oswald's high security clearance in the Marines, what, that is, it knew and suppressed to the degree it could, should instead have impelled it to take testimony from those in the Navy who had knowledge of such matters and to question them vigorously. We have seen other suppressed Oswald information that required it to question the Navy.

Not only did Oswald have these exceptionally high security clearances, he got openly in the mail Russian and supposedly Communist literature. Under normal condition this would have led to some Navy interest and inquiry. But these were other than normal conditions and there was no inquiry. Not only did the Marines give Oswald these high clearances, he also learned how to speak and write Russian when he was a Marine. That is, under the Navy. Not only is this without any explanation -- it was without any investigation.

From the records the Navy, including its ONI, gave the Commission, neither the Navy nor the ONI made even a pro forma investigation of that rather exceptional thing, that it taught a high-school dropout to be fluent in Russian while he was a Marine along with giving him those high clearances and then gave him a hardship discharge so he could go to Russian a few weeks earlier than had he awaited his coming discharge. And then did not prosecute him with getting that "hardship" discharge by fraud. It also did not give the Commission the records of Oswald's security check that had to exist for him to have those high clearances.

Normally, just getting that kind of literature would have jeopardized if not terminated those high clearances. There would, at the least, have been an ONI investigation of it.

I begin my long-delayed NEVER AGAIN! which the publisher could easily have had in the bookstores by July 1993, by stating and proving that there was a de facto government conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself. Those identified in the documents I there use do not include the Navy of any of the Commission. But is it not obvious that the decision not to investigate the crime itself extended to the Commission and to the Navy?

Whether or not Oswald was the assassin, the official mythology that is disproven by the Commission's own misrepresented and ignored records, he was the only assassin according to the entire government. That makes anything at all about him more than merely relevant in any investigation. Any detail about the only official candidate for assassin is essential in any investigation.

Nobody knew more about Oswald than the Navy.

Yet it withheld at least what I indicate herein from all, from the FBI to the Commission.

And that about the man who supposedly alone and unassisted allegedly killed the President, the Navy's commander in chief.

It cannot be regarded as a simple bureaucratic oversight that the Navy suppressed all these significant details of Oswald's career in the Marines. That the Navy did this and has not since disclosed any of it, not even under the 1992 law that requires it, points the Navy's own accusatory finger at the Navy.

There are other details and other mysteries. For example, Oswald could not have gotten from London's Heathrow Airport, from the time stamped on his passport, to the Helsinki hotel he checked into en route to Russia by any commercial carrier. The CIA made that investigation and the Commission published its report in its appended 26 volumes. The investigation to learn how Oswald was able to get to Helsinki before any commercial carrier could have gotten him there was never made. The obvious possibilities include having been taken there on a military plane.

With all these at the very least strange and provocative things existing in official records, neither the Commission nor any agency made even the pretense of an investigation of them.

Each has its own importance and each indicates that the government had some kind of special relationship with the man the same government says assassinated its President. That when he went to Russia it was in the interest of some military agency is the conclusion that cannot be avoided from the aborted CIA investigation of whether or not he could have gotten to Helsinki when he did on any commercial flight. There was no investigation to determine whether he was flown on some military plane, planes our military attaches often have at their disposal. This means that no special plane would have had to be provided. Moreover, records are kept of all flights. So the investigation would not have been difficult. But all interest in any investigation died when the CIA learned and reported that Oswald could not have gotten from London to Helsinki by any commercial plane. In turn this indicates that after his Marines discharge, which he got by unprosecuted fraud, he maintained some kind of connection with some arm of the military services, the Navy being the most likely.

Chapter 9: The Navy Record Demands That It Be Suspected

Then, too what the Navy did and did not do when it had complete control over the disgraceful mess called the autopsy performed on the President requires that the Navy be suspected. What it did was not a mere botch. It is another Navy accusatory finger pointing at the Navy.

I began going into this in great detail in Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report. I added to that in even greater detail and then with some of the records that were not available at the time I wrote that first book, in Post Mortem. It was published in 1975. To this moment I have had not a single complaint about what I published beginning in 1965 from or on behalf of any of the Navy medical personnel in any way involved in that autopsy. I add to these earlier writings in what the publisher for no comprehensible reason has delayed for so long, NEVER AGAIN! This is not the point for repeating or trying to repeat all of that great amount of misrepresented, official information. That is not only impossible, it is not necessary for my present purpose, to report what makes the Navy suspect. What follows is from what I published earlier and has not been disputed or complained about.

Then Navy Commander James J. Humes was the pathologist in supposed charge but in fact what he did and did not do was dictated to him by his boss at that large Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, Admiral C.B. Galloway. Humes' assistant, also a pathologist there, was Commander J. Thornton Boswell. Neither was what is required for an autopsy in a criminal case, an accredited forensic pathologist. They did not make required examinations in that autopsy. The X-ray and photographic film are of far from the best quality and quite inadequate. In addition, as I first indicated in Post Mortem, there is reason to believe that what is officially described as all the film exposed during the autopsy is not that at all. It without question does not represent all the pictures and X-rays required of a decent autopsy.

During the autopsy examination all civilians were made to leave the autopsy room and a Navy guard was posted by the Navy to prevent any civilians from entering it. The only exceptions were the FBI and Secret Service agents. They were there throughout.

Humes testified to the Commission that he knew nothing about the performance of a tracheostomy on the front of the President's neck by Dallas Dr. Malcolm Perry until he spoke to Perry for the first time the day after the autopsy. That was false as reported above. He spoke to Perry and learned what Perry had said about that wound during the course of the autopsy. Perry, supported by the Parkland Hospital chief of neurosurgery, Dr. Kemp Clark, had identified the wound in the front of the President's neck as a wound of entrance. I also repeat because of its significance -- they did that three times in the course of the press conference soon after the President was pronounced dead. That press conference was taped and transcribed by the White House and was released to the media in Washington as the first such transcript of the Johnson administration. That the neck wound was identified as an entrance wound was also reported in the media. The Washington Post's story of which Humes used parts in his autopsy report also included this identification of that wound as one of entrance.

False swearing to what is material is the felony of perjury.

Humes had completed his holograph of the autopsy on Sunday, November 24 when he learned from the TV that Oswald had been killed. That meant there would be no trial of Oswald, no cross-examination of any evidence, including of that autopsy report. Humes then burned that handwritten copy of the autopsy -- of all places in his recreation room fireplace -- and wrote a different one. That evening in Admiral Galloway's office Galloway directed other changes be made in Humes' substituted handwritten autopsy report. Substantive, factual changes. It then was typed at the Navy hospital. In the second autopsy report substantive changes were then made in what it said. I have photographs and a xerox of the original of that replacement holograph. The Commission published a xerox of it. I found the original and other hidden medical records misfiled by the Commission where nobody would ever think to look for them, where they did not belong, with what the Commission sent to the Government Printing Office to be published. I there also found the original and all copies of the certificate of death by the President physician, Admiral George B. Burkley and other of his records hidden there. I published both in facsimile in Post Mortem along with other related records.

For Oswald to have been the lone assassin, the official determination that was close to immediate and was well before anything that could be called an investigation was made, all the shots had to have come from the back because Oswald was supposedly behind the President when the President was killed. So the entrance wound in the front of the President's neck was called an exit wound. A wound in the President's back was mislocated several inches higher than it was and was called the entrance wound of the alleged wound of exit in the President's neck. Then, still trying to limit to a single assassin, all the non-fatal wounds, five of them suffered by Texas Governor John B. Connally, who was on the jump seat in front of the President, and by the President, were also attributed to that one bullet and to it alone. And from that history, which was not ever to be duplicated in any of the testing done for the Commission, that magical bullet emerged virtually unscathed -- without so much as a scratch from the many bones it allegedly struck. Yet it is said to have struck bone on smashing four inches of Connally's fifth rib, to have demolished the heavy bones in his right wrist, and to have lodged in his thigh, leaving a fragment there, then to have snuck out much later and after much travel and hid under a hospital gurney mattress said to have been the one on which Connally was. When the Hospital employee who found that bullet -- when it fell out from under the mattress -- not only refused to so testify -- he testified he'd not be able to sleep if he did. (Whitewash pages 161-2)

As the autopsy protocol does not say and as the doctors testified did not happen, X-rays show fragments of bone in the President's spinal-column area. This was later admitted elliptically by the prosectors and it is stated specifically in the study of the autopsy film made by the most eminent experts the Department of Justice could convene to make that study. I reproduced both of these official reports on the autopsy film in Port Mortem, pages 565-96. In the Department's panel's interpretation of the X-rays, under "Neck Region," they report "several small metallic fragments are present in this region." This is to say that a bullet did strike bone in the President's body, which the prosectors testified it did not.

I follow these reports in Post Mortem with a suppressed FBI picture of the front of the President's shirt that in itself destroys this official autopsy mythology. (page 598)

That magical bullet is, in the official mythology, required to have exited through the President's shirt collar and his tie. The pictures reflects what the Warren Commission's ignored and misrepresented testimony says, that the bullet hole in the President's neck was above the shirt collar. There are no bullet holes at all in either the collar or the tie both of which are supposed to have this magical bullet go through them!

When Humes testified before the Warren Commission he testified to his burning of the original autopsy protocol. He also then testified that he had turned his notes in. I published a series of receipts for those notes and that the Commission had them was stated by its counsel in charge of that area, since then become the senior Senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter. But when he was before the House assassins committee and then also under oath, Humes testified that what he burned was his notes. Receipts for those notes that I published are by the Secret Service, which received them from Admiral Burkley, and by the Admiral himself on Sunday, November 24, when they and a copy of the protocol were delivered to him. The Commission had them -- and memory-holed them.

Humes later said that the reason he burned his notes is that they were bloody and he did not want any improper uses made of those bloody records. By the Secret Service? The Admiral? In fact the page of them that could not be withheld, what is known as the body chart locating wounds and marks on the body, holds the President's blood and other fluids. I held it in my hands after finding where it was hidden. I have color pictures and a xerox of the original. I published the xerox of the original in Post Mortem (page 310). It bears Admiral Burkley's "verification" of it in his handwriting.

There is more, much much more, but this is the kind of an autopsy performed on the body of its commander in chief by the Navy and an indication of what Navy officers testified to that was simply not true.

Why the Navy saw to it that there would not be a complete competent autopsy and why there then was all this dishonesty about it, including false swearing by Navy officers, unanswered questions, do constitute a Navy accusation against the Navy and a very serious one.

Perhaps in some respects innocently, it was the Navy that arranged for the autopsy to be at its major medical installation.

On the plane back from Dallas, the President's Physician, Admiral George B. Burkley, told his widow that the autopsy had to be at a miliary hospital for security. He then suggested to her that because the President had served in the Navy during World War II, the Navy's hospital would be appropriate.

There was no need for any special "security" for a corpse and there was no need at all for the autopsy to be at only a military hospital. The most urgent need was for the best possible forensic pathologists to perform the autopsy. It was part of and basic to a murder investigation, not a military or a protocol matter.

Whatever the reason, Burkley, personally "accepted and approved" Humes' certification he had "destroyed by burning" the autopsy rough draft. (Post Mortem, page 524) Burkley also wrote "accepted and approved" on Humes' certification that he turned in the "autopsy notes and holograph draft" and was silent when Humes later testified that what he burned was those autopsy notes. (Post Mortem, page 525) On the next page I print in facsimile Admiral Galloway's covering letter to Burkley that included these notes. And on the page following that the Secret Service receipt to Burkley of two days later than includes getting from Burkley the "notes of the examining doctors."

Much of this has to have been known and well-known to many in the Navy hospital at the time, including but not limited to Admiral Galloway -- the admiral who saw to it with the orders he gave them that his pathologists would not do a complete autopsy and did not do what is absolutely essential in a death by gunshot, track all bullet paths through the body.

I go into all of this in detail, with new information about it, in NEVER AGAIN!

There was much deep-sixing relating to the assassination.

When I wrote the Navy Hospital under the Freedom of Information Act seeking any autopsy records it had it replied that it had none, that it had turned all its records over to the White House. This is unlikely but it is what the Navy wrote me. Under its own regulations what the Navy did was wrong and it knew that it was wrong. It is required to keep such records for set periods of time. From what it wrote me that I do not believe it did not keep even a xerox copy of anything at all.

It remains to be seen whether the Navy has anything stashed way in some Davey Jones' Locker, a popular phrase circa World War I and later.

Beginning with the strong and determined opposition to the President policies that the Navy shared with the other services and its representatives on the Joint Chiefs of Staff shared with others of the Joint Chiefs, continuing through Oswald and what the Navy has kept secret about him indicated in part above, and climaxing with its seeing to it that at best, to quote my second book, of 1966, the President had an autopsy unworthy of a Bowery bum, the Navy's record demands suspicion and raises the most substantial questions about it and any involvement in the assassination.

How many other reasons can there be for keeping all that Oswald information secret and seeing to it that the autopsy would be as terrible and as misleading and deceptive and dishonest as it was, quintessential as the autopsy is in any murder investigation?

But it is not only the Navy hospital that claims not to have a single piece of paper on the assassination. The entire Navy, including the Marine Corps claimed that under the 1992 law requiring the disclosure of all records relating to the assassination in any way, claims to have not a single piece of relevant paper!

Under that law the National Archives made public its list of what had been transferred to it. It is headed "JFK Collection Register." The first of the six columns after their numbers of this register of the collections transferred to the Archives is "Agency." There is a partial description in the second column, the extent of each deposit is indicated in the next to the last column. The last is "Comments."

Not a piece of paper from the entire Navy is listed as given to the Archives for disclosure under the 1992 law! Not one! With all that it has, for example, on Oswald.

But in fairness to the Navy, this is also true of all of the military.

Perhaps the Air Force had no records, but the Army did. I have referred to some. Its Military District of Washington, which at the very least was involved with the body and its honor guard at the autopsy and after it, does have some. It disclosed copies of some to others and to me years ago.

But, of course, with Oswald having been in the Marines, which is part of the Navy, each has to have and each should have transferred those records to the Archives under that 1992 law.

In fairness to the military it is far from alone in this overt dishonesty, this deliberate and flagrant violation of the law -- and that relating to records that have any assassination connection.

Taking a few others, for example, the records of the President's Committee on CIA Activities Within the United States, which was created by and ceased to exist under President Gerald Ford, is represented by a deposit of three feet, it was transferred by the "Gerald R. Ford Library," which is part of the Archives in any event. That commission was headed by Ford's pal from the Warren Commission, David Belin. Belin of the non-stop mouth and writing about the assassination. The Belin who proclaimed loudly and often that he had seen all the CIA has and it has nothing at all he did not see. With a total of only three feet to the records he saw, that is "all," as he said, that the CIA had.

If we skip ahead to toward the end of this register, we find that the CIA itself transferred but a single file -- and it has to have more than this one file -- titled "Lee Harvey Oswald's Personality File (201-289248)" with an extent of 18 feet!

And in three feet mouthy, self-righteous, know-it-all Belin saw all 18 feet?

Of the other relevant files the CIA has, a minute fraction only of which it disclosed earlier, is what it did to interfere with critics of the official mythology and its espionage on us. I have a not inconsiderable file on some of its spying on what I said that I did not get from the CIA. It did not disclose that to me, although the 1967 law I invoked required its disclosure to me, and I repeated the request later under the Privacy Act when it was made the law of the land. The CIA has other records, for examples of what it did for and told the Warren Commission. The existence of such CIA records was disclosed by the Commission. I have several hundred pages of them and that is far from all.

So all of the government part of the military-industrial-intelligence complex is also lawless, not having given the Archives as much as a single piece of paper from the military and the CIA having given it but a single file, whether or not complete, of all it has.

The former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, is represented in this transfer by an unexplained one inch! The Commission transcripts he was given alone are of greater extent and he had many, many other records copies of which were given to him so he could perform his duties as a Member of the Warren Commission.

Yet Dulles is alone among the Members, save for Gerald Ford, in being reflected in this register of the "all" that was required to be made available to the people through their National Archives. Others deposited records elsewhere but that is not reflected in this register.

The Department of Justice, of which the FBI is part, got on the mendacity bandwagon through several components.

The Civil Division, which handles all the FOIA lawsuits filed against the government -- of which I alone filed more than a dozen -- gave the Archives four inches! Under "comments" is this, the entire comment: "Includes Weisberg vs. Webster case." William H . Webster for a while was the FBI's director. I filed more than that one suit against the FBI so there is more than that one "Webster" case alone file that the Civil Division has. And how about the other dozen of so of my cases the Civil Division handled, and how about its relations with the Congress on the assassination, including by giving testimony on FOIA to the Senate Judiciary Committee's appropriate subcommittee?

My copes of what the Civil Division has in my litigation alone, and there were many, many other such lawsuits, besides what I have in boxes, take up two stuffed file cabinets! Each drawer of which holds two feet of paper. My copies of the part of the Civil Division's relevant records is more than 24 times greater than all the Civil Division gave the Archives! And it has other non relevant FOIA records of which I know. It handled, for example, the Department's panel of experts who reviewed the autopsy film. It handled the litigation in which that report and the one by the prosectors that I published in Post Mortem and cite above were disclosed. And it has more of which I knew that it violated the law by not giving to the Archives.

But the Department's Criminal Division is even worse -- it did not give the Archives a single page!

In long-delayed and partial compliance with my request more than a decade ago it gave me several file drawers of copies of records it has and kept secret from the Archives. That it is incomplete is certified to in what I was given. It includes a partial list of what I was not given.

There are other Justice Department components that have relevant records from my own files and knowledge that are not represented in this register of what was given to the Archives. I have some copies of their records, like those of the Office of Legal Counsel. I have a file cabinet of my own appeals, for example, and many others appealed withholdings and other noncompliances with FOIA alone. The appeals office transferred nothing at all.

All of the components of Justice transferred a total of four inches of records.

Then there is the FBI. It is represented by a much larger volume. It transferred 52.5 feet of records. This is impressive compared with the others but it is far, far from all the FBI has. Its transfer is limited to four of its relevant files. Those that it transferred it had already disclosed, in 1977 and 1978. I have had them since January, 1978, when a federal court ordered the FBI to give me copies of them as rapidly as it could. (In C.A. 77-2155) But I also filed other lawsuits against it and under that litigation what I did get, despite extensive non-compliance I proved in the federal court, comes to quite a few full file cabinets of its relevant records that it did not give the Archives as required of it by the 1992 law. I have a much greater volume of the FBI's records by far than the volume of what it gave the Archives according to this supposedly complete list.

I have at least a file drawer of CIA records I got from the FBI and the CIA does not include in what it gave the Archives under the law. I also have about a file cabinet full of other CIA records not included in the registry.

Then there is also the perplexing question, what in the world was the CIA doing with 18 feet of records in its one "personality profile" file on Lee Harvey Oswald?

Eighteen feet of records on Oswald, and that in a single file only, the personality profile file? That means, assuming jam-packed file drawers, two full file cabinets and an extra drawer of just this one file, without our knowing how much of that one file is still secret, secrecy being the dope on which the CIA keeps going.

Eighteen admitted feet in that one file all withheld from the people who paid for it for 30 years. With even the existence of this file not mentioned to the Presidential Commission in charge of the investigation. This file and its content had to be kept secret from the official investigation, too? Not mentioned to the FBI, either?

This one file that was begun before the file was decided upon, before the personality profile 201 file was authorized. According to John Newman, the retired Army intelligence major who is also a long-time academic, he saw records in this file that establish the CIA interest in Oswald beginning before this 201 file was authorized. That CIA Oswald interest was by three different CIA components each of which deals with spies, our spies, their spies and the spies of both.

At least three components on record with such a pre-assassination interest in a punk Marine, the interest that grew into a massive 18 feet without any assurance that more of this file is not still secret.

What was there about Oswald, this young Marine who said he was defecting that justified this initial interest by three different CIA components whose work relates to spies? Or that in the end justified the simply enormous amount of money, effort and time represented by at least 18 feet of records on him?

Does the CIA go to that much trouble and expense for all defectors, real defectors or not?

These 18 feet of admitted records represents an astounding amount of work and cost, of time and people taken from other CIA work and of the money it used up.

This certainly was not some kind of spook parlor game, not what grew to this at the least 18 feet of admitted records in that one file. It seems to indicate an out of the ordinary interest in Oswald, with no visible explanation for the magnitude of it. Whatever the reason, it must be extraordinary. So also is the deep secrecy of it all with it hidden from all official assassination investigations. What in the world can there be that the CIA had to hide from the Warren Commission and the FBI?

We have no way of knowing how many more secrets the CIA still keeps secret. That it was able to hide 18 feet of records for from a single file when it is known to have other relevant records does justify the belief that it does not intend to come clean, to comply with the law.

It can have more secrets than the Navy from the extent of this one file.

The FBI also still has secrets, still has not disclosed all it has, not by far!

Only one file from the FBI is of greater volume then this one CIA file. That one is its main JFK assassination file from its headquarters. (It transferred no records from any of its many field offices according to this register.) It is 22.5 feet in extent. This one FBI file on Oswald is of 18 feet, as is the CIA's personality-profile file alone, all it give the Archives. The other two transferred FBI files are smaller, totalling 19 feet.

When the law required the deposit in the Archives for the people of all government records relating to the assassination and the entire government violates that law, is it not necessary to wonder why?

What do they all have to hide, keep secret in violation of the law, and why do they keep it secret and violate the law?

But our major interest here is in the military, and of the military the Navy in particular. What does it have to hide that impelled it not to give the Archives as little as a single piece of paper?

We may have to wonder why, but there is no wonder about the fact that it kept secret all it has, and that "all" has to be extensive. It is still secret after more than 30 years and with a 1992 law requiring its disclosure.

What it still and illegally keeps secret includes its records on Oswald's security clearances and the records of its investigation to determine whether he should or should not be given those clearances.

It includes the investigation required to have been made when it was reported that Oswald had defected to the USSR.

It includes the investigation required to have been made when Oswald was accused of assassinating the President.

Among many others, it includes all records in any way relating to that disgrace to the nation, its terribly bad autopsy which has been under criticism from the time the Commission's Report was issued in 1964.

And, of course, records of those criticisms and of any responses to them.

There have to be some reasons and those reasons must include that the Navy does not want what it still keeps secret to be known.

There can be no legitimate reasons for this secrecy and for this determined violation of the law.

This still again is the military pointing an accusatory finger at itself.

Chapter 10: Is There Any Limit On What The CIA Is Capable Of? Or Did?

What we can know of the military's violation of our Constitution and laws and of our founding basic principles we can know, to the degree relatively few Americans do know, because it was not always protected by secrecy. Thus others could make and leave records some of which are quoted herein. Secrecy and the cult of secrecy protects the CIA from the consequences of its excesses. All of them will never be known and what little is know is in fact not known to most Americans. Little is known about its assassinations -- murders -- but that it planned them came to light in the first Senate investigation of intelligence activities. It was known as the Church committee because its chairman was Senator Frank Church of Idaho. What happened to him guides others in political life who get the same kinds of ideas. He was defeated by a vicious, dishonest and well-financed attack by the radical right, which is all for those kinds of departures from traditional American belief.

Richard Helms was the first CIA director to go public. When he addresses the annual convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association in Washington, he asked them to "trust us" because "we do not target on Americans."

Which at that very moment he was doing with full intensity, as the Church committee later exposed. The CIA's "operation Chaos" was to create chaos among and to report on those Americans who opposed the Vietnam war which was disastrous for the United States and so many Americans and their families.

The CIA then and earlier was intercepting the mail of Americans with Europe and a few others places, as that committee also exposed. The FBI picked the foreign mail up at designated post offices, including New York City in particular, and delivering it to the CIA. There is no reflection of this in the records disclosed to me by the FBI and the CIA in response to my requests under the Freedom of Information and the Privacy Acts, but mine was intercepted and my right to be published was denied me that way. A friend who had connections in Europe introduced Whitewash to both a British and a German publisher, each then a major publisher in those countries, and each liked the book.

Collins, in England, then asked for an opinion of John Sparrow, warden of All Souls at Oxford. He killed it, as my friend, Sidney Kaufman, later told me. (Sidney's field was movies. He produced the Macbeth that won an Emmy for NBC-TV, among his many accomplishments in that field. He served in both the Army and the Navy in World War II and was in the OSS with me.)

As I also learned later, Fischer AG in Germany wrote me several times about its desire to publish Whitewash in Germany. I never got any of Fischer's letters. When I did not respond, not having gotten its letters, it mailed the manuscript back to me. It never reached me, either.

In 1966 I had a fine man as an agent in London, Gordon Harbord. I sent him the chapters of Whitewash II as I wrote them. I heard nothing from him. Then, after two months, I got a cable from him telling me that all my mail had reached him in one delivery. It then was too late to mean anything at all.

Before then Harbord had submitted Whitewash to Sir Leslie Frewin, a London publisher. Frewin also went for the book. As he later wrote me, when it too made no difference, he was literally drafting the contract for its publication when he was fed bad information about a competing book and the opinion that the British market would not support two books on that subject. There was a competing book but it did not appear until long after Whitewash would have creamed the market.

When I told my friend Steve Barber, Washington correspondent of the London Standard that Sparrow had talked Collins out of publishing Whitewash, Steve told me, among other things about Sparrow, of his longtime intelligence connections, especially as a recruiter.

After all the earlier books on the JFK assassination had been published in this country and after Jim Garrison was getting great international attention, Sparrow wrote a lengthy article, "After the Assassination," for The Times Literary Supplement of December 14, 1967. It is seven newspaper pages of small type, a long piece. It attacks all the books critical of the Warren Report in various ways, using the usual formula, the Warren Commission was right because it says it was right.

Sparrow's article got considerable attention here. The New York Times' long-time Warren supporter and biographer, Anthony Lewis, gave it a full column, for example, as did in varying degrees other major United States publications. The Times gave another full column, also by Lewis, in support of Sparrow by Lyndon Johnson intellectual in residence, John P. Roche, the day before Sparrow's article was published in London. My file reflects the fact that other of the major media, including TV, also gave that Sparrow old-news propaganda a big play here.

Then, of all improbable things, the Sparrow article that had already gotten such extensive attention was published here as a book when in fact it was more like a pamphlet in size and format when it appeared. It was far less than the page size of a book and ever so much thinner. But it once again got considerable attention in all the media, old as it was by then. There was little likelihood of it being a commercial success, but then it was published by a publisher owned by a large defense contractor. For its purposes the relatively slight loss the inexpensive book would have sustained was worth it.

After it appeared I wrote Sparrow reminding him of his getting Collins not to publish Whitewash. In his response of March 8, 1968, he does not deny this. He does not even refer to it. In a later letter he says merely that he did not remember it.

There is little doubt about it, the spookeries all work together. A CIA directive to its stations abroad that it did disclose directs them to draw on all assets to have the assassination books disapproved, publicly criticized.

That is a proper function of an intelligence agency?

In our country?

These are not all the evidences of the CIA interfering with my being published. Which is to say violated the Constitution, the Constitution all who work for the government are sworn to uphold and defend.

The publisher who contracted the book in 1964 told me he had a best seller in it in late February, 1965.

"The salesmen have orders for 39,000 copies," John Ledes, his vice president told me, and that without any advertising, just from the subject matter. "That," Ledes added, "means a gold- plate best seller," as in those days it did.

But then that same Ledes made an overnight trip to Washington and on his return the book was cancelled. Without the manuscript being returned to me. And without any explanation or reason.

Who he saw in Washington he did not tell me.

Ivan Obolenski did not last long as a publisher. His father had been a famous spook in War War II, in the OSS.

The next publisher to whom I was referred predicted an even greater success.

"With this book, your background and our public relations know-how," the editor who read it told me, "You will be the best-known private citizen in the country and we'll have the Green Felt Jungle of 1965." (I had been a reporter, an investigative reporter, a Senate investigator and editor, and I had been in intelligence, the OSS, in World War II. I go into this background in detail in the manuscript Inside the JFK Assassination Industry.)

The Green Felt Jungle was the best-selling book of 1964.

That was the excited prediction all the way up to the president, who also owned most of that publishing house. He had a legitimate reason for rejecting Whitewash as he did.

He had published a fraudulent book, Calories Don't Count. Six men were already under federal indictment over that book. As his words were conveyed to me, "Were I to publish this book it would be the red flag under the charging bull. I do not want to be the seventh man indicted."

Next I was referred to the Frederick Praeger publishing house by a dear friend, Sol Rabkin. He had worked on the Senate Civil Liberties Committee with me. He sent me to a friend of his, Mort Puner, Praeger's director of special projects. After Puner read the book he predicted an initial print in hardback of 50,000 copies, large for those days, and another best-seller prediction.

"However," he told me, "the final word is Mr. Praeger's. He is in San Francisco. Call me after he returns next week."

He then told me that Praeger had rejected the book, the book Puner believed would be a best seller. I asked him the reason Praeger gave. "We publish only established scholars" he quoted Praeger as saying.

(In all Whitewash received more than 100 rejections internationally before I decided to publish it myself. There was not a single adverse editorial criticism in all those rejections.)

It took a few years for the real reason to become known. That was when the CIA's non- intelligence activities began to be exposed, at the time of the Church committee. It was then disclosed that Praeger was a CIA publisher. It planted books it wanted published with him.

The First Amendment and its prohibition of the government "abridging the right of free speech, or of the press . . . .?"

The record of the CIA, like that of the military, is that our Constitution and laws do not apply to it and that it knows best what the country needs.

If it decides that the country requires it to violate the Constitution and break the laws, that is what, patriots all as they are, they do.

The copy of the manuscript of Whitewash II that Harrison Salisbury, then managing editor of the New York Times mailed back to me in the late summer of 1966 never did reach me.

The ribbon copy of Oswald in New Orleans mailed to me from New York took three weeks to reach me. It then was in a post office wrapping, the original wrapping entirely missing. With it was a note from the Washington post office telling me that the package had been received in Washington without a wrapping and that it was sent to me at the address found inside it. There was not a single damaged page of the more than two inches thick manuscript. Not one page was bent over or torn. Yet received at Washington's main post office without any wrapper? It then was mailed to me at an address other than could have been found inside the manuscript. That had my address as only the town near which we lived. It appeared at the end of the foreword. However, the post office used my then full address.

There is, of course, no proof that it was the CIA that had these two manuscript copies intercepted within the United States. It could, for example, have been by the FBI, not for the CIA as it did with foreign mail then for the CIA. Or it could have been for the CIA.

These kinds of intrusions into the life of an American writer and the right of the people to know should be done by our government?

In this country?

Aside from what the CIA did itself to interfere with basic American rights and to spy on those of us critical of the official assassination mythology, it used commercial services to spy on and report what we said in public. I have carbon copies of transcripts of what I said made for and sent to the CIA but not addressed to the CIA by name. It and others were sent to "The Public Affairs Staff" at a Washington post office box. This "Public Affairs Staff" had an account in that name at the Riggs bank in Washington and it had that name and box number on its envelopes, which I have. That is not any reference to the CIA. But was the part of the CIA it used for spying on what Americans say and think. Two of its spooks drove to the Washington office of that commercial service to pick transcripts up. One I was told had an attache case handcuffed to his wrist! In a phone conversation with the manager of that office he told me that I had the CIA's "all-time track record" in its assassination interests. I taped that conversation. And I have a transcript of a conversation between him and an office of that service in another city in which he said "goody, goody!" when told I would be there. He said he knew the CIA would want a transcript and that meant more business with it, more money from it. I have the envelope the "Public Affairs Staff" used in mailing checks and copies of those checks.

There were decent Americans -- strangers to me -- who did not like this American police statism of the CIA's. They sent me these proofs of the CIA's spying on Americans, within the United States, prohibited by its charter.

As I report elsewhere, there is a prima facie case that through its E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate infamy, the CIA blocked the arrangement I had made with the original Saturday Evening Post for the serial rights to Whitewash. That Post editor wanted to deal with me through a literary agent, which I did not have. He sent me to Maxwell Wilkinson, of Littauer & Wilkinson, literary agents. Wilkinson read and liked the book but then he also did not consummate the agreement I had already made. He said the book did not lend itself to the use of individual chapters. Later, the men's magazine Saga asked me for the use of one chapter standing alone for which it told me it paid me a dollar more than it had paid Ernest Hemingway.

When at Watergate time I checked Hunt through standard sources, I found that for those years he gave as his address in Who's Who "Littauer & Wilkinson, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York City," He then, in 1939, switched his address in Who's Who to the Washington Building address in Washington that was used as a cover address by the public-relations firm of The Mullen Agency. Mullen, a CIA asset or front for years, then had fancy offices only two blocks away, at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where Hunt was officed. His office mate was Douglas Caddy, who ostensibly then worked for the United Fruit Company, a CIA asset as it turned out during the Senate's Watergate investigation.

Earlier, in Washington, at less fancy addresses, and in other cities, The Mullen Agency had the same address as the CIA's Free Cuba Committee, again as listed in standard sources.

When Richard Helms, who during this period was the CIA's director, testified to the Senate Watergate committee he lied in telling it that only after Hunt retired from the CIA it recommended him to The Mullen Agency. (Whose then head Robert Bennett, later, like his father before him, later became a Senator from Utah.) Hunt was a CIA employee when he years earlier began working at Mullen, and Helms had to know it. But then, as I note elsewhere, when Helms was found by the courts to be a perjurer he was praised for that by his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, that being the apotheosis of true patriotism. The same Williams who served on the Presidents Intelligence Advisory Board in supposed oversight of the spooks and did nothing at all about its anti-American domestic activities that were prohibited by its charter and by our Constitution.

While Hunt was a CIA employee and worked at The Mullen Agency his office mate, Douglas Caddy, was part of the campaign to get the liberal Supreme Court Justice Douglas impeached. Caddy wrote a nasty book about Douglas. Hunt was involved in that book. He also wrote an introduction to it. And the publisher's address on the book is -- the cover address of Hunt and The Mullen Agency! I have a xerox of the book and of the incorporation papers of the shadow publishing name used as its publisher. Other names in this record have an address that can be the address given by the Cuban Watergaters in their testimony. They testified that when they reached Washington they were to go to an address in Dupont Circle. The committee did not ask for the precise address. Names in that shadow publishing front set up to be part of the campaign to impeach Justice Douglas have a P street address almost on Dupont Circle.

This kind of political activity is supposedly prohibited government employees, of the CIA in particular. But Howard Hunt was part of it, and he then was a CIA employee. His cheap pot- boiling spook fiction Helms had on conspicuous display in his office according to press accounts I have.

Another "Mullen" employee who used that same Mullen/Hunt cover address also used a Mexico City address, as did Mullen, on the same street as the office of the Mexican lawyer who was involved in laundering a large sum in checks contributed to Richard Nixon's campaign for re- election. This money was used for improper and illegal purposes by Nixon's former law partner, his attorney general and campaign manager, John Mitchell. This man, whose name and address I have, disappeared from Washington when the Watergate scandal broke. None of this was ever investigated by either the Senate Committee or the Watergate Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. That office did not respond when I under FOIA requested copies of records it had entered into evidence in court -- made public. It was nonresponsive when later I went there. I did not even get inside it.

Douglas Caddy? He was the first lawyer who appeared to represent the captured Watergate burglars the night they were caught in their burglary and bugging act and arrested.

As the Watergate scandal worked its way to no impeachment for Nixon and he resigned, he had already appointed Gerald Ford, former Warren Commission Member, to be his vice president when Spiro Agnew, caught in criminal acts of graft, had to resign. Not long after that Ford thus became Nixon's hand-picked President. As one of his earliest acts Ford pardoned Nixon. Then Caddy had another book appear. It was virulently anti-labor. Ford promoted it by praising it at a press conference.

This is the same Ford who appointed his Presidential Commission, Nelson Rockefeller to head it, to supposedly investigate CIA excesses. He also appointed to be its operating head his fellow Warren Commission JFK assassination whitewasher, one of its former counsel, David Belin. Belin was no less a proficient CIA whitewasher in that role, as I indicate elsewhere. (Including in my 1976 reprint of my 1967 book, Photographic Whitewash, pages 295ff)

Who was Leon Jaworski, adored by the media as the great Watergate investigator when he was special counsel heading that "independent prosecutor" investigation, besides being a highly respected macher in the bar association? Besides being a partner in a major Houston law firm and a power in Texas politics and counsel to the farce of the Texas Court of Inquiry into the JFK assassination? Jaworski reflected himself as another of the whitewashers, especially in intelligence matters, during his sideline of doing that on that do-nothing official Texas investigation of the JFK assassination? What did he do on that so-called Court of Inquiry that the Johnson White House, which was involved in it, and Commission chairman Earl Warren and its general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, wanted done?

Alonzo Heidt Hudkins, Jr., who later became a friend of mine, better known as "Lonnie", then with the Houston Post, was one of the reporters who first wrote that Oswald reportedly had had some kind of connection with the FBI or the CIA. The Commission went out of its way not to take testimony from Lonnie. He was not even questioned privately. As Jaworski wrote Rankin early in the Commission's life, he went to see Houston's Post's publisher to have him lean on his employee Hudkins to get him to prepare an affidavit denying the story. Jaworksi's friend, J.P. Hobby, Jr., the paper's executive vice president and executive editor, told him that Lonnie had left his employee. "Inasmuch", Jaworski wrote Rankin, as you have an FBI denial of the story, "is it really worth your while to follow up on Hudkins?" (Whitewash IV, page 146)

Rankin took Jaworski's advice, so that question still lingers unanswered.

The supposed FBI number assigned to Oswald, the real one not the fake Lonnie used in his story, is 110669. While I do not know what this number means, it cannot be an FBI number. It is consistent with CIA numbering. And, coincidence of coincidences, this famed and respected Jaworski, who whitewashed and covered up all he could get away with when he ran that supposedly independent Watergate investigation in which the CIA was so heavily involved so much of which remained secret, was, as I wrote in Whitewash IV when Jaworski was still alive and had not a word to say about it,

"a director of the M.D. Anderson fund, a CIA front, despite the CIA's involvement in the scandals. Hobby also had a CIA foundation front. Both were exposed in 1967." (page 146)

So we do have investigations and they do manage to expose as little as they think they can get away with so that the people will not know the full sordid truth; so that more drastic actions will not be required; so that the status quo can remain that despite the scandals. They all had leads they refused to follow and they all knew better than some of the false testimony they were given under oath. That is perjury, and perjury is a serious felony.

Like Helms' testimony that Hunt did not go to work for Mullen until after he retired from the CIA when he was a CIA employee when he went to work at Mullen. That committee also have a live lead on Hunt that it did not follow up, that he had had as a New York a address that of the literary agency, Littauer & Wilkinson. Hunt had had a conversation that was taped in which he spoke of having in his New York office a phone with a direct line to his Washington office. He said that people who phoned him believing that he was in New York spoke to him when he in fact was in Washington. So, if The Watergate committee or Jaworski's office of special Watergate prosecutor or David Belin's later covering-up Ford Presidential Commission had done any investigating at all -- had even looked at Who's Who -- they would have uncovered another and a major CIA scandal that they all wanted to avoid. And if they had checked the well-known and widely-published lists of fronts used by the CIA, they would have found among the CIA's foundations still another, the Littauer Foundation, with a New York City address. It then could have learned what then was impossible for me, whether the Littauer of the foundation and the Littauer of the CIA's Hunt's uses were in any way connected.

If they had wanted to, as obviously they did not.

I had no secret leads on any of this. They were all public. And ignored, including by the media.

All of this avoidances of the obvious served to protect both Nixon and the CIA.

And to deny the people the full truth about their subversions of our system in protecting both Nixon and the CIA.

How obvious?

Besides my use of Who's Who, it was David Zitch, then a schoolboy in Reseda, California, a Los Angeles suburb, who sent me his tracing of the CIA's The Mullen Agency and of its Free Cuba Committee and others at the addresses they shared as this schoolboy traced them through the standard public sources at his public library!

In avoiding the public scandals that should have been exposed and could have been so easily, the highly respected Watergate committee and its much-honored chairman, Senator Sam Ervin, the reputed Senate expert on the Constitution -- he was referred to as "judge" -- created no new scandal by merely recalling Helms's assurances to the nation's publishers at their convention that the CIA did not "target" Americans when it did that in multiple thousands, as the Church Committee later did to a limited degree expose. That was strictly prohibited by its charter, as was all domestic activity of which we here have but the slightest glimpse.

Not does it charter authorize it to kill, here or abroad. (The Church committee began the exposure of its plans to do that but did not carry that forward to develop any proof of whether it did.)

But that it planned killings, assassinations, and attempted them is without any question at all. And who plans and tries to do them without intending to?

While so much of what it did is so very wrong and while so many of its people were involved in all these many things that were so very wrong, it would be a mistake to believe that as they saw it they were doing any wrong at all. They believed, like the military, that they were the true patriots doing only what the country needed having done and that because it was as they saw it the country's need it was right, not wrong.

An attitude that can justify anything at all.

Including as it did, assassinations.

It cannot be asked too often, what right did the CIA have to engage in these improper domestic activities when that was strictly prohibited by its charter?

It did this in other ways and it violated the law in doing it and in refusing to disclose it when that was required of it by the law: by FOIA.

The point I want to emphasize is not personal. It is that when an agency runs amok in its law and Constitution violations, is there any point at which it stops? Or, when it is in the habit of violating both the law and our Constitution, does what impels it to do these very wrong things represent what is important enough to it for it to consider anything at all if it regards more serious violations in its interest or in the interest of what in its convoluted thinking it regards as in the nation's interest?

When I used FOIA seeking all the CIA's records on or about me, I got no response at all. Jim Lesar who handled my FOIA lawsuits, then phoned its general counsel, Lawrence Houston. Houston invited us to come see him. He did see us in his as I recall seventh floor office, near that of the director. He then told us that the CIA had no record of my filing any such request. So I showed him the carbon copies of them. That appeared to surprise him. He said he'd look into it. And that did result in my getting a small collection of the CIA's records on me. But far from all.

It did include some for which I had made a pointed request. Giving them to me did not embarrass the CIA as those it withheld could have and with any attention, would have. But in what it did give me that I had made this pointed request for it was also clearing itself in that what it did disclose reflected well on me and they proved that the information was returned to me.

Without going into the whole story, before Pearl Harbor, before FDR established the OSS, his son Jimmy was then working in a predecessor agency. I took Jimmy for his father the plans I had been able to get into this country in the diplomatic pouch because the writer for Click magazine for which I was then the Washington correspondent feared that he could not get them here any other way. Click was then the third largest picture magazine, after the original Life magazine and LOOK. The writer was in Chile, where the postal service was thoroughly penetrated by the pro-Hitler Spanish Falange. He had gotten the plans for a Nazi putsch in Santiago, Chile. An undersecretary of State made the arrangements. He was a friend of mine. I also made that information available to the Department of Justice where I then had a friend who headed its criminal division. FDR used that information in one of his famous "fireside" chats that had all Americans with radios glued to them.

Those records had been inherited by the OSS, whose records the CIA inherited.

But having the OSS records the CIA did not disclose to me the decoration the nature of which I forgot long ago that its head, General William "Wild Bill" Donavan, awarded me.

Probably by accident what was also given to me included is an internal CIA Office of Security memo written when Houston had first asked for all the records on or about me. That memo states that the "Security" office had two files on me. The memo was x-ed through and not given to the CIA's general counsel and even when it was disclosed to me, those files were not included. Nor did anyone going over the records that were disclosed to me ask for those two relevant files. More than two decades later the CIA is still keeping at least those two "security" office files on me secret from me. Despite the new law that also requires their disclosure.

That those in the other CIA components had lied to its general counsel in telling him they had nothing on me, which he did tell Lesar and me, is bad enough. But then giving the proof of the existence of relevant files and then withholding them and nobody inside the CIA picking that up and asking for them is much worse. All who saw that memo are culpable.

In what the CIA finally did give me there was nothing about its above-reported domestic spying on my appearances and its intrusions into my mail and my being published here and abroad.

Simple, ordinary everyday honesty is not a CIA fault.

Nor is complying with the law.

This raises a similar question, when the CIA lies even to its own general counsel, is there any limit to what it is capable of, particularly when that lying is with the intent of violating the law?

This also raises questions about what in the world the CIA was up to violating its charter to investigate Americans inside the United States, where all such acts were also prohibited for it? What business is it of the CIA's what any American thinks, says or does? Or writes? Or publishes? It has no law-enforcement responsibility and they were also prohibited it.

It was, in fact, compiling dossiers on Americans who were not engaged in any activity that was any proper business of the CIA. And when it did compile a dossier on one American writer and that one office had two separate files on him, does this not cause wonder about its practices and whether they include all writers whose writing the CIA or any nut in it may regard as controversial or does not approve of? Does this also not raise questions about the extent of CIA illegalities and whether there is any limit on them?

Was this limited to writers?

Could not that wrongful thinking and wrongful activity extend to teachers and college professors? To lawyers who handle cases the CIA does not like? To reporters? Editors? Is there any end? And is this not the manifestation of the police state, what in lesser degree the Gestapo and the KGB did? Is not the principle the same?

Then the CIA resorted to another of its dirty tricks, a CIA specialty, to keep me from getting any more records from it. It sent me a large batch of records I had not asked for on a different subject, its mind-bending experiments, experimenting on human beings. Under its own regulations, if I had requested those records, the CIA was required to give me an estimate of cost in advance and at that time to get a partial payment from me. It was to set the amount of that partial payment, too. It did neither.

I did not want or have any use for a large volume of records it sent me. It refused to accept them back. It then held that because I had not paid it for the records I had not ordered that it had sent me, under its regulations it was prohibited from letting me have any more records.

In fact, despite my ignored appeals to which I attached copies of its own regulations proving that it, not I, had violated them, the CIA has not since then disclosed a single page to me, not in some 20 years. The only CIA records officially disclosed to me since then are copies of those it gave other agencies, like the FBI. Government FOIA regulations require the approval of the agency of origin for disclosure of its records by any other agency.

In its deliberate violation of the law, including of my request for records it later disclosed in part without letting me have copies of them, it denied me the ability to use another law, the Privacy Act, by keeping from me other of its records on or about me. In those records it includes defamations of me. I learned this from Anna Marie Kuhns Walko, who told me that under the 1992 law requiring that all records related to the assassination be deposited at the National Archives for public access, the CIA included some of these defamations. They are now available for misuse in which those who misuse them to defame me are immune.

One of the reasons for the Privacy Act was to give Americans the right under the law to file corrections that were to be filed with and made available with records relating to people that are not correct. It is an easy matter, and the FBI's records abound in this, to twist actualities and to omit what is relevant to impart a dishonest and defamatory meaning to records the agencies generate when the truth is the exact opposite of what they contrive.

Thus, in keeping secret from me, although I had made formal requests for them under FOIA more than two decades earlier, this collection of defamatory records on me that are deceiving and misleading the CIA also denied me my right to file corrections it would have had to disclose along with distorted versions. While this did not assure that those using those records would be bound to include my corrections it would have made it possible for those of honest intent to know and use the truth. And if I had been able to file corrections when I asked for those records under the law the CIA would have been forced under the Privacy Act to make my corrections accessible to those in the government, including the FBI and within the CIA, who mis- used them, to know the truth.

This, clearly, the CIA did not want. So, it added to its illegalities this additional illegality in its pursuit of its other illegalities and at the same time disseminated defamations of me while having them uncorrected in its own files for misuse by others inside the CIA.

Meanwhile, it has seen to it that I do not know what false and defamatory information on me it has made public and no way of knowing what other such information it may have. Or whether what it disclosed includes what I report above that I know about and have proof of.

Or, if disclosed, whether its meaning was twisted in any way by internal memos and interpretations.

Lest it be believed that with the scandals that so disgraced it in 1994 or that it finally took a law seriously, as applying to it also, the CIA that has always violated the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts was no less lawless and authoritarian in its behavior and violation of the new 1992 law.

My friend Ray Kurpis, of Orlando, Florida, when he was working at the new and modern Archives building on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, got a computer printout of supposedly all the records on me in the archive as of the fall of 1994. The stack about three- quarters of an inch high, is far from complete for all agencies and the CIA did not disclose a single record. A few it had given other agencies are listed. But not a single one as transferred by the CIA. Not even of my assassination FOIA lawsuits, one of which was against it and it as involved in others. Not even its records of which I have copies and told it so.

I write the then director, R. James Woolsey about this on October 17, 1994. My letter is long and detailed. Under both Acts I requested belated compliance with my requests going back to 1971. I reminded him of the CIA's obligation to have done that under the 1992 Act that required full disclosure of all assassination records. I ticked off proofs I have of records it has and withhold and of its intrusions into my life and work, with details of documentation.

He did not respond. Nor did any of those other authoritarians who deceive themselves and the country into believing that they believe in democracy, our system or government.

Three weeks later I mailed a copy of this unanswered letter to the new ARRB that is to see to full disclosure under the 1992 Act. Five days after that I reminded Woolsey that he had not responded as the law requires.

Woolsey never responded. Nor did any of his like minded anti-democrats.

Woolsey was forced to celebrate the Christmas season by resigning. He was forced to do that by the strong reaction to his incredible protection of all of those who should have detected that Richard Ames was a Soviet mole, and did not even try. Not one of the many of them was assessed . What the hell, Ames was only responsible for all those retaliations and were murdered because those men sought to help the United States. Why punish those who contributed to those murders and could have prevented some?

That was too much for the media that treats the CIA as immune from almost any offense until that becomes impossible, as in the Ames case. It was too much for the CIA's other stalwart friends, especially politicians. It was too much for everybody, including some within the CIA and caring for it. In the end it was too much for Woolsey, too.

Quitting under strong pressure is at least one honorable act that can fairly be attributed to him.

On its part, the ARRB let me know in December that it might get around to what I Woolsey about sometime in the future. Maybe.

After all, the CIA had only behaved like an Ameriform Gestapo or KGB in its intrusions into my life and work on the Kennedy assassination.

And the Privacy Act, which is supposed to allow me to file correcting statements to be provided with those that defame me? I am only in ill health and almost 82 years old so why rush?

Meanwhile, all those defamations are freely available to all without the correction I should have been able, under the law, to file two decades ago and since then.

The CIA is unchanged and absent an entire rebuilding it will remain unchanged, and there can be no meaningful rebuilding with all those authoritarians remaining in its employ.

No matter how often it preaches it believes in and is the protector of democracy, its records is one of neither understanding nor practicing it.

When on so relatively minor a matter, except that it is not minor to me, when it can with such determination be as intendedly lawless as it was and remains, there is no reason to believe that it will be other than anti-democratic unless and until it is rebuilt from scratch.

And when on so small a matter this is its record, there is no reason to believe that it is not capable of anything at all and of justifying anything at all to itself.

Long heil! red, white and blue.

If any government violations of our laws and Constitution are minor, these are minor. Especially when compared with interferences with my publishing. It is especially minor compared with assassinating a head of state.

Yet there is the CIA's long record of broad law and Constitution violations, whether or not evaluated as minor. This raises the question of whether its lawlessness was much greater than has been exposed and whether, particularly when it did plot other assassinations it could have been involved in the assassination of its own President. With these a slight reflection of its lawless record, is there any persuasive reason not to believe that it was capable of anything it wanted to do, law or no law, Constitution or no Constitution.

For all these years the Congress has been easy on the CIA. First it had no oversight committees. Then, when it did have oversight committees, the supposed oversight sometimes amounted to a license to do what was wrong. The Congress has always gone out of its way to make little of and to protect the CIA in its illegalities. Thus for example, the Senate Watergate committee, while putting on a big and exciting show on live coast-to-coast TV, was actually avoiding all it could avoid and get away with avoiding.

Aside from the CIA as an institution, which no record I have seen indicates had anything to do with the assassination itself, there are its overly-dedicated self-starters, E. Howard Huntniks, so to speak. What about those super-patriots who believe that whatever they believe is right and proper, of what are they, in their genuine dedication, capable?

In saying that I have seen no record in any way involving the CIA in the JFK assassination, as distinguished from disinforming and underinforming about it, I do not mean to imply that if there was any kind of CIA involvement it would have been put on paper.

The best-known of the CIA's assassination plots is the one in which it enlisted top mafia figures to get that job done, it had no records at all.

Not a single one of any kind.

It disclosed this to me under date of February 14, 1989 with a referral back to it from the Department of Justice.

On May 11, 1962, when Robert Kennedy was attorney general, he asked it for a statement of fact regarding that assassination plot the CIA had actually attributed to the Kennedy. The CIA prepared a "memorandum for the record" on this three days later. In it the CIA says:

"Knowledge of this project during its life was kept to a total of six persons . . . and there were no memoranda on the project nor were there any other written documents or agreements."

Nobody outside the CIA knew and it saw to it that it had no records relating to any way to it.

The CIA's assassination plots were not limited to Castro. Castro gave a visiting Congressional delegation what he said was a list of about a dozen of them with some details. The CIA has not admitted to those plots Castro identified. So there is no way of knowing how many times the CIA plotted assassination of foreign leaders, whether or not of others. The one against Patrice Lumumba in what was then known as the Congo was officially admitted.

By ghoulish coincidence, just when JFK was assassinated one of its officials was handing a Cuban official expected to kill Castro for it a ballpoint loaded with a deadly poison. This CIA agent, Rolando Cuebela, later confessed but was not killed by Castro.

In an interview with John M. Crewdson, then of The New York Times, E. Howard Hunt told him, in the words of its December 26, 1975 headline, "Hunt Says C.I.A. Had Assassins Unit." Hunt said that in the mid-50s he was told by agency superiors that this unit was headed by Boris T. Pash. Pash denied it.

It was reported to have planned to kill other heads of State, Egypt's, for example.

There may have been others or there may have been no others.

But that the CIA has admitted plotting to have heads of state killed.

It has this record.

And it has a long and far from fully disclosed record of illegalities, of crime.

It has this record, too.

Thus the question lingers, whether or not as an agency function it was involved in the assassination of its own head of state, a man with whose policies it was in the strongest disagreement, the man who fired its popular long-time director, Allen Dulles.

One of the reasons this and other questions linger is that supposed oversight was a farce. As David Wise wrote in his 1973 book on which we draw later, The Politics of Lying (Random House, New York) about this alleged oversight as of that time, the time before the Church committee's limited exposures:

The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 exempted that agency from all federal laws requiring the disclosure of salaries and personnel totals. It gave the director of CIA power to spend money "without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds."

One of the great myths perpetuated by the CIA is that its classified budget and activities are carefully watched by four House and Senate subcommittees. In the Senate, the five-man CIA subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee is headed by Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis, who is also chairman of the parent Armed Services Committee, displays a benign, friendly attitude toward CIA.

"This agency is conducted in a splendid way," he assured the Senate in his courtly Deep South tones during a debate over CIA in November, 1971. "as has been said, spying is spying . . . You have to make up your mind that you are going to have an intelligence agency and protect it as such, and shut your eyes some and take what is coming."

Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, a member of the CIA subcommittee, did not bother to conceal his irritation. Symington thanked Stennis for his observations and added acidly: "I wish his interest in the subject had developed to the point where he had held just one meeting of the CIA subcommittee this year, just one meeting."

The late Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana arose to defend the Senate's keen scrutiny of CIA activities. Ellender was chairman of the CIA subcommittee of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee; this is one of the subcommittees that goes over the agency's budget "line by line," as CIA director Richard Helms attested in a speech to editors in April, 1971.

Ellender, thus certified as the chief Senate watchdog over CIA's budget, took the floor end and announced: "This is a rather ticklish subject. It is a subject that I do not care to discuss in the open." Senator J. William Fulbright then suggested that the CIA's funding of a secret army in Laos could be discussed; that, after all, had already been publicized. The full extent of the control over CIA by the appropriations subcommittee then became clear from the following exchange:

MR. FULBRIGHT: It has been stated that the CIA has 36,000 there [in Laos]. It is no secret. Would the Senator say that before the creation of the army in Laos they came before the committee and the committee knew of it and approved it?

MR. ELLENDER: Probably so.

MR. FULBRIGHT: Did the Senator approve it?

MR. ELLENDER: It was not -- I did not know anything about it.

After some further discussion, Ellender explained: "I never asked, to begin with, whether or not there were any funds to carry on the way in this sum the CIA asked for. It never dawned on me to ask about it." (pages 113-4)

When Senator John C. Stennis, chairman of one of the Senate's supposed oversight committees said the CIA "is conducted in a splendid way" without having called a single meeting of his "oversight" committee and another of those chairman, Senator Allen J. Ellender, "did not know anything about" the CIA's having an army of 36,000 in Laos, that there was no oversight at all is obvious. With the knowledge that there was no real oversight on it there was nothing to inhibit the CIA when it got some of its wilder notions.

And for those kinds of ideas, at the second TOP SECRET Warren Commission executive session at which they worried over the report that Oswald had had some such connection, Member John J. McCloy, who had had considerable experience with them, told the other members, "I have run into some very limited mentalities both in the CIA and the FBI." (Whitewash IV, facsimile reproduction of stenographic transcript, page 72)

At that same executive session, Member Allen Dulles, who had headed the CIA into its Bay of Pigs fiasco the failure of which some in the CIA blamed on President Kennedy, assured them that perjury was right and proper for agents and for the director.

Asked about a CIA agent telling the truth about something touchy to the CIA, Dulles said, "I wouldn't think he would tell it under oath, no." Asked "Why?" by Warren, Dulles replied, "He ought not tell it under oath. Maybe not tell it to his own government . . ." (page 62) Asked if he would (as CIA director) "tell the Secretary of Defense?" Dulles said, "Well, it depends a little on the circumstances."

Helms, of course, proved that Dulles was honest in TOP SECRECY when he expected perpetual secrecy for what he said.

So, quite aside from whether the CIA had JFK assassinated, when it came to some of its agents with "very limited mentalities," Huntniks, so to speak, and their very strong and ultra-right political beliefs there is nothing of which I know that leads to the belief that it was at all impossible.

The CIA did go in for assassinations and at least some of its agents, other than assassins, for example, again Hunt, knew it did, Hunt among others. So they knew that for what the CIA regarded as necessary or for patriotic reasons assassinations were perfectly proper.

Blaming its own dirty works, what is known in the trade as an "executive action" or in general as "wet jobs," on the Kennedys when he had to know that was false, it was the CIA's well-practiced liar and perjurer of a director, Richard Helms, who swore to the House assassins committee on September 22 and 25, 1978, that the Kennedys were behind its mafia plot to assassinate Castro when its own records prove the exact opposite (Hearings, Volume IV, pages 55 ff and 118 ff)

So, while on the record -- and on this it should be remembered that there was that immediate government conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself -- there is nothing to indicate that the CIA had anything to do with the assassination, there is nothing in the CIA's record to persuade that any such involvement was not possible for it.

The CIA has always made policy, as even the author of the biography of Allen Dulles that is so favorable to him admits.

This is how David Wise, without question a subject-matter expect, concludes his review of Peter Grose's Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, (Houghton-Mifflin Company) for the December 11 New York Times Sunday book review section:

". . . As Mr. Grose says (of Allen Dulles), 'He always claimed that his duty was only that of a professional intelligence officer, leaving the policy-making to others -- to his brother.' (Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) That was not the whole story, of course. Mr. Grose also notes that many of the C.I.A. operations under Allen Dulles determined policy.

"In the end he grew weary. Not long before Dulles' death, an eager young C.I.A. recruit called on the great man at his home, hoping for inspiration. He did not find it. 'Oh,' Dulles said, 'perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other people.'"

The CIA's dirty works extend to creating foreign policy. That violates our system. Under it foreign policy is determined by the President. So, naturally, the CIA says it does not create policy, that it does only what it is told to do. This was the testimony of former director Richard Helms before the House assassins committee (Volume IV, pages 5-250) That testimony was as truthful as his word to the annual convention of the newspaper-publishers' association when he told them, "Trust us. We do not target on Americans." In fact he was convicted of not being truthful.

The CIA's making of policy and its determination that the Cold War continue, that there be no detente, is well illustrated by the disastrous Francis Gary Powers U-2 flight that was shot down deep inside the Soviet Union. It had as its clear intent -- and this would have been true if Powers and his plane had not been shot down -- breaking up the step toward detente, toward a more peaceful and less militaristic world, the Paris Summit that President Eisenhower and the USSR's Nikita Khrushchev had arranged.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee took testimony of it on May 31, 1960, 30 days afterward. That testimony was kept secret for 12 years. I obtained a copy of the volume that was related when it was released, in 1982. Much was expurgated but the unexcised transcripts were to be deposited at the National Archives for the future.

The committee's volume has an understated title for this part, "Events Incident to the Summit Conference." (pages 251ff) When the committee's report critical of the whole thing was issued, fourteen of the committee's members endorsed it. One voted against it. Two issued a minority report defending that May 1 overflight. In his speech on that occasion long-time Committee Chairman William Fulbright (D. Arkansas), in the words of the committee's introduction to this section, "charged that as a result of the U-2 affair, the international prestige of the United States 'had reached a new low'".

That overflight was a violation of international law. Our violations with those U-2 invasions were then four years old (page 308 and elsewhere) It could have been interpreted as an act of war. It was certainly a serious offense and its offensiveness to the USSR cannot be exaggerated.

Then CIA Director Allen W. Dulles, the major witness of a number of high officials, said that he, personally, selected the date that made it even greater insult to the USSR, May 1, the major May Day holiday in the USSR. (pages 283, 293 and elsewhere) He said he acted under "the existing authority" for those flights in general but that it was only on the afternoon of the day before, April 30, that he ordered the flight for the next day. (pages 293, 313 and elsewhere) The cover story for picking that particular day, the one most certain to offend the USSR more than almost any other day, was "weather"-- they had to do it that day and not later because of "weather conditions". (pages 293, 354 and elsewhere)

And then, to leave no doubt at all that he wanted to give the USSR and Khrushchev the greatest possible offense, he made Khrushchev out to be a liar in saying that the USSR had shot the plane down when it was over 70,000 in the air and when he put its wreckage on display.

He said that the USSR could not have shot the plane down from that altitude but did when it was much lower (page 287) and that the USSR had not recovered its wreckage. (page 290)

Referring to what Khrushchev said on May 5 "as an attempt at deception" Dulles then referred to what the USSR had by May 5 put on display in Moscow and of which photographs were taken and distributed as "photographs of a pile of junk -- according to experts, pieces of an old Soviet fighter plane -- Possible for making us say that the U-2 plane had been effectively destroyed. Since the fake wreckage was quickly identified for what it was, this particular ruse had no effect." (pages 290-1)

What the unidentified "experts," most likely Dulles' own in the CIA, referred to as "pieces of an old Soviet fighter" was in fact the Powers U-2 plane, and American reporters along with anyone else who wanted to and photograph it, did see.

Powers, after repatriation, testified that the explosion of the missile made it impossible for him to reach the self-destruct mechanism, that he did open his parachute after he was clear of the plane, and that he did not take the poison the CIA gave its U-2 pilots with instruction to use it if captured.

This whole thing quite obviously was designed to wreck the summit and any beginning of the end of the Cold War. The retired General of the Armies Dwight Eisenhower reacted as a Cold Warrior, not as the President of the United States. When Khrushchev was willing to go ahead with the summit if his face was saved with an apology, Eisenhower refused to apologize.

After all, it was only an act of war -- an invasion.

After all, we had only violated their borders and international law, had given them recognized cause for declaring war and referred to their leader as a liar -- what was there to apologize for?

Whatever Eisenhower's reason, and much of the world was aghast at his position, it was his chiefest spook, Allen Dulles, who without specific orders to send that plane that day of all days, did that on his own authority, sublime in the belief that whatever happened it had an excellent chance of heightening rather than cooling the Cold War, the CIA's policy when it was not Eisenhower's. Eisenhower had invited Khrushchev here. His coast-to-coast tour was a big success and it was popular here. He and Ike then agreed to the summit. Those were meaningful steps in reducing tension and leading to better relations. But that was not the Dulles/CIA policy and so the Cold War got colder and the enormous costs to the world were greatly magnified.

When the CIA can do this -- and it did do it! -- can it be said that there is anything of which it is not capable, like an "executive action" against its and our own chief executive?

Ike did not fire Allen, brother of his first secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Instead he put him in charge of next great fiasco, another one that resulted in a still further international reaction against the country, disgracing it then and in history, the Bay of Pigs.

In which, as we see elsewhere in this book, the CIA again had its own agenda, again taking the country and the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.

After this book was written there was a published reminder about the CIA and the worst of tyrannies around the world, particularly in Latin America.

While it is the CIA's proud boast that in accord with national policy it supports democratic regimes, especially in Latin America, it has a long and consistent record of actually installing vicious, murderous dictatorships and of overthrowing democratically elected governments to this end.

David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt have written glowingly on their roles in the CIA's busting a modestly leftist elected Guatemalan government. Its crime, as seen through CIA eyes on the right extreme, was including all elements in the government and in instituting a land reform program, what the United States has espoused elsewhere in the world.

As Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote on November 6, 1994 about the tyranny installed by Phillips, Hunt and the like-minded CIA Cold Warriors more than two decades after they had installed a bloodlusting military dictatorship, it is "a regime that has murdered between 150,000 and 200,000 of its citizens in recent decades."

Ms. McGrory was writing about the tragic case of an American woman, a Harvard lawyer, Jennifer Harbury, whose Guatemalan husband is among the thousands arrested by the CIA- installed regime and its successors and about whom, without American protest, those regimes claim to have no knowledge at all.

Then there is the even greater number of Guatemalans who fled to avoid being murdered merely because they were democratic and thus regarded as enemies of the CIA's military dictatorship.

Under the Reagan and Bush administration these refugees were held not to be refugees and were denied refuge in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Organizations, especially religious groups that sought to help them, were actually prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

Guatemala is not the exception. It is one of the many illustrations of the fact that murder is a CIA business.

With all the unmet real needs of both countries, all this vast amount of money and effort was invested in what we did not need, what created greater danger from those weapons , and what led to the USSR to assure its coming bankruptcy by trying to catch up with us in mutually- destroying madness.

In that same issue of the same paper Walter Pincus, one of its CIA experts, reported what the outgoing chairman (Dan Glickman of Kansas) of the House intelligence committee said about the "gap" between the CIA and presidents:

"'There is a serious distance between the White House and the CIA' that is harmful to President Clinton, the agency and the development of foreign policy."

Also the same issue reported President Clinton's decision to ask for the appropriation of an additional $25 billion dollars for the military. The Republicans were then demanding an additional $45 billion dollars for the military.

So we could "lead" the world.

"Lead" or SIOPs the world, it is the same thing, save for the number of deaths and the suffering, with this country suffering the enormous expenditure for the military and that much being taken from urgent domestic needs. And to continue to pay for decades what whose reduced efforts to meet urgent domestic needs mean in the problems they magnify, the people whose lives are ruined, the great percentage of our people not having that appropriated so they could be better prepared to meet the real needs of the country with the Cold War supposedly ended.

With it ended, with the dissolution of the USSR, the military needs this fantastic added sum? Not to defend the country!

But what has been true for years, that the CIA does what it wants to do and that there is no end to the demands of the SIOPisfied military wants and gets, remains true and all other considerations are subornate to them.

Here, too, it makes policy.

Also after this book was written there was surprising confirmation of what I say about the CIA having and following its own agenda and not doing what it was created to do from the man Jimmy Carter put in a position to know better than anyone else. It is reported in Christopher B. Daly's December 3, 1994 story to the Washington Post about a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That conference was sponsored jointly by the CIA and Harvard University.

Former CIA director Stansfield Turner today stunned a conference of dozens of current and former agency analysts with a blunt critique of the CIA's effectiveness -- and his own -- during his term in office.

Although not listed on the program, Turner stole the spotlight . . . .

Turner said the CIA "didn't do well" in foreseeing the downfall of the Shah of Iran or the collapse of the Soviet Union and had consistently failed to serve the president in its handling of its premier analytical product, the lengthy documents known as National Intelligence Estimates.

These reports were not inaccurate or misleading, Turner said, but were simply "irrelevant" to the president in making policy. "If anyone is to blame, it is I," he said.

Speaking of the enormous wastefulness and great cost of continuing to manufacture nuclear weapons when we had a vast superiority in them, but apparently with no SIOP in his mind, the retired admiral said,

Turner said it was important to recall that at the time U.S. forces were capable of absorbing a Soviet nuclear attack and still deliver a counter-punch that would have destroyed 70 percent of the Soviet economy.

"How could we have thought we possibly needed more?" Turner asked. He said the agency should have told Carter there was no need to build more weapons, except for purely political reasons. "What it should have said to him, in my view, was simply two words: 'Too much.' We and the Soviets both have too much firepower to need any more," . . .

Chapter 11: Who's Coup?

In this country, whatever the intent of the assassin or assassins, the assassination of any president has the effect of a coup d'etat. That is automatic. Unlike the past, when kings were killed to be replaced by other kings, and unlike countries in which the assassination of the head of state can put other parties or people in power, in the United States the succession is prescribed and is inflexible. The vice president becomes the president. If something happens to him, then the succession is also fixed.

As a practical matter candidates for president chose as their vice presidents those who have beliefs other than their own and who by those different beliefs can appeal to a part of the electorate to whom the presidential candidate does not appeal or does not appeal as much.

Take the recent case of Ronald Reagan, of the ultra right extreme when he ran for president. In his first campaign he selected Pennsylvania's liberal Republican Senator Richard Schweiker as his vice president. Politically, they could not have been more unalike. When he ran the second time, he chose of all people the man who had campaigned for the presidency ridiculing Reagan, George Bush. He referred to Reagan's economic proposals as "voodoo economics."

Eisenhower selected Richard Nixon not because he liked or respected him, which he didn't, but because Nixon could appeal to those of more extreme views with his Red-hunting reputation.

That is the way it always works. It is the way it worked with Kennedy and Johnson.

They held different views and did not even like each other. Kennedy precipitated a major revolt among his strongest supporters, the unions, and what is so influential in the state with a major source of votes, the New York Liberal Party, when he picked Johnson. They and other Kennedy supporters, including many of those closest to him, were aghast when he picked Johnson and on the point of revolt.

The biggest difference between them was that Kennedy was dovish and Johnson was a prominent hawk and a leader of the hawks. This was even clearer by the time JFK was assassinated. It thus was known to those responsible for the assassination that in killing Kennedy they would make a hawk President. This was as certain as that the day follows the night.

That Oswald was either the assassin or the lone assassin is the official mythology. The official evidence itself is the overwhelming and irrefutable proof of this, it is mythology. In addition, the official evidence itself established beyond any question at all that the assassination was the end product of conspiracy. Of all the many -- and entirely undisputed -- proofs of this I brought to light in my earliest book, and that from the official evidence only, is the little known fact that when the country's best professional shooters tried they could not, not any one of them, duplicate the shooting attributed to Oswald. This was in my 1965 book, the first of the Whitewash series, on page 26. And four pages later I reproduced in facsimile the official Marines' evaluation of Oswald as a "rather poor 'shot'."

There should be no question about this and there isn't, but there may be in the minds of those not aware of the truth. The truth has been publicly available since my first book.

A test of built-in and intended dishonesty was made for the Commission by the Army at its Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. The shooters were professionals, all with the highest rating of "master." They fired at fixed targets, not a moving target, with no obstruction in their way. They had all the time in the world to adjust to their shooting, not the tiny fraction of time Oswald allegedly had for his first shot through a tree of dense foliage. The rifle was thoroughly overhauled for them, and it needed overhauling, and to make the telescopic sight work shims were placed under it. Otherwise it would have been off-target. And instead of shooting while supposedly trying to hide from a window more than 60 feet in the air, they were on a stable platform half that height and with no obstructions of any kind. Yet with all of that not one could duplicate the shooting attributed to the duffer, that "rather poor 'shot'" Oswald. Not one could do the shooting within the time permitted in the official "solution."

I go into this in greater detail in NEVER AGAIN!

There is no question at all about it. Nobody in the world, not even the Howard Donahue who claims to have once, has been able to duplicate the shooting officially attributed to Oswald.

While there are innumerable other proofs that the official "solution" was known to be impossible at the time it was hoked up, innumerable proofs that it is wrong, impossible and knowingly so, the most comprehensible and unquestionable fact is that the best shots in the country, under vastly improved conditions and without the emotions and having to meet all that Oswald allegedly had to meet and overcome, failed to duplicate the Super-William Tell feat officially attributed to him.

And on this simple basis alone, it is without any question at all that the assassination was by a conspiracy. There are many other proofs that there was a conspiracy in the misrepresented and ignored official evidence.

Conspiracies do have purposes.

The obvious purpose of this conspiracy had two parts. One was to get rid of John Kennedy and his policies. The second was to make Lyndon Johnson with his policies the President of the United States.

There is nobody who had any experience at all with rifles like the one Oswald is said to have used who did not at the very least have real questions about even the possibility of that kind of shooting in that very, very short period of time, less than six seconds. After my first book was out two young men, both 20 and both members of the National Rifle Association, came to visit me to make fun of the official solution, of attributing that shooting to Oswald with that rifle. They told me that rifle was known as "Mussolini's contribution to humanitarian warfare."

There are few of any rank in any of the military who did not know that the shooting attributed to Oswald was impossible. As we see above, the Commandant of the Marine Corp, which is part of the Navy, certified it. Throughout the military it had to have been well known and understood that the official "solution" to the assassination of their commander in chief was impossible. Yet none in the military said a word about this in public.

And the official test that proved the impossibility of the official solution was an Army test. So the Army in particular was aware of the truth. And was silent.

Even Lyndon Johnson, if his word is to be believed, knew there had been a conspiracy. This means he knew that he became President as the result of a conspiracy.

In 1994, in the disclosure of some of Johnson's phone calls, there was confirmation of what I first brought it to public attention in my 1974 book, Whitewash IV. In it, on facing pages (24 and 25) I print in facsimile two staff memos reporting Chairman Earl Warren's first conference with his staff, on January 20, 1964. Melvin Eisenberg became one of the Commission's counsels from a law firm, from private practice. Howard Willens was a Department of Justice lawyer who was loaned to the Commission.

In Eisenberg's memo he states that Warren told his staff that the reason he took the job of chairman, which he knew that as the Chief Justice he should not do, was because if he did not there could be a "war that could cost 40 million lives."

Willens avoids this specific language. He said instead merely that "the President was concerned about international repercussions of the assassination and called upon the Chief Justice to help."

There can be all kinds of "repercussions" but imagining what they might be does not make the record Eisenberg made, that 40 million people could be killed. That would not have been possible if the assassination was by a lone man, with no conspiracy of any kind. It is only with the assassination being by a conspiracy that could make a nuclear war be possible with the USSR.

Johnson did not keep secret from those he expected not to talk that he believed there had been a conspiracy to kill JFK. In a phone conversation with Cartha DeLoach, then the FBI Number four man, third under J. Edgar Hoover, late the night of April 3, 1967, in DeLoach's words, the President's close assistant "Marvin Watson . . . stated that the President had told him in an off moment that he was now convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt the CIA had something to do with this plot." (FBIHQ main JFK assassination file, 62-109060-5075)

Part of the military-industrial-intelligence complex in Johnson's belief.

There is no question, there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. The only question is who conspired. In the absence of any official investigation of the crime itself, and no real investigation of the crime was made or intended to be made, we are left with only circumstantial evidence, what lawyers refer to as motive, means and opportunity.

Who had or could have had the motive and the means and the opportunity?

Not just the motive. Or the means. Or the opportunity. Or any two.

As John Kennedy himself said about the means and opportunity, anyone can kill the president if he is willing to give his life for doing it.

But in the case of his own assassination, there is virtually a limitless number of people, groups or organizations who can be believed to have the motive for killing him. With most, however, of what is known through and despite the official investigation, meeting all three requirements limits the possibilities to very few.

With Oswald not the assassin, as he wasn't and could not have been from the official evidence itself, he was framed. Who could have known enough about him and who could have gotten away with framing him? Not just to frame him. To exculpate themselves if to do more than permit the shooters to escape.

Those with the capability of doing this are very, very few and almost certainly had to be governmental.

Who, for example, could have gotten that rifle into the building and hidden it with such care without being detected?

Who could have planted that so-called magic bullet at the hospital?

Who could have placed those three empty shells to be found in the Texas School Book Depository Building? Or the pieces of bullet in the limousine?

Who could have made that paper bag in which he allegedly carried that rifle into the Building and left it there undetected or placed it there after the search began? It was neither detected nor photographed when the police first photographed that area. And, with the magic required by the official mythology, used magical paper that did not have a trace of the well-oiled rifle in which Oswald supposedly walked through the streets of Irving, Texas, with that rifle sliding around in it. With the additional magic of being able to retain fingerprints but not having any fingerprints where Oswald, from the official evidence, carried it through those streets, by its top, then laid in on the back seat of the car of his fellow worker Buell Wesley Frazier, and then carried it by its bottom from that car into the building.

Who could have made that bag from a roll of heavy Kraft paper and left no fingerprints on it in making?

And who would have done this -- undetected -- and inside that building, the requirement with the bag taped together with a paper tape that was automatically wet by the dispensing machine and thus had to be used on the spot? While leaving no fingerprints on that tape, either?

Who could have pulled all of this and more, as the official evidence requires, and have expected to get away with it and then get away with it?

Very, very few.

The actual evidence, as I go into in great detail in my earlier books, is that Oswald did not and could not have fired that rifle that day. This is lied about officially but it is the official evidence itself that proves the truth. It also proves that he could not have been in that window at the time of the shooting.

This raises questions about the so-called investigation and whether those who saw to it that the crime itself would not be investigated were part of the conspiracy to kill.

My belief, based on what I know about the evidence and the investigation and when and by whom the decision not to investigation the crime itself was made, is that although FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was one of those who did conspire to see to it that Oswald was held to be the lone assassin and that the crime itself would not be investigated, is that neither he nor the FBI was part of the conspiracy to kill.

There is an adequate explanation of Hoover's seeing to it that the crime was "solved" immediately by attributing it to Oswald. He had created the public image of being on top of and able to solve any crime. He and the FBI had not the slightest idea about who did the job and were not about to admit it. So, they wiped it out as solved with Oswald's arrest.

The official conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself was, from the official records I got from the FBI and the Department of Justice, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach's idea. He got it right after Oswald was killed and he knew there would be no trial. He conferred with Hoover on this and an FBI record I have states that Hoover agreed with him that very afternoon. It is with this documentation that I begin NEVER AGAIN!

However, in the LBJ phone conversation released in 1994, the former hawkishest of hawks, Walt Rostow, had the same idea perhaps a little earlier. These records for so many years kept secret make it possible that the idea originated with Rostow and Katzenbach liked it and adopted it as his own.

For the conspiracy to succeed, it was not essential that Oswald be convicted. What was necessary was for the actual shooters not to be caught. This meant they needed enough time to get away. Planting what pointed to Oswald did give them the time to get away. If on real examination the evidence pointing to Oswald did not stack, as it does not, by the time that could have been established the assassins were long gone.

For the framing of Oswald to become the official solution may have been no more than a convenient accident. That it would hold up could not have been expected or depended upon.

Had there been a trial from the actual rather then the misrepresented evidence, Oswald would have been acquitted unless the case was rigged.

But by then that would have made no real difference to the successful conspirators.

What they wanted they had and it could not be undone.

Jack Ruby eliminated the trial. But that does not mean that Ruby was part of the conspiracy to kill the President. His killing of Oswald was not essential to the conspirators, but it certainly did help them. Nobody who knew him would have trusted Ruby with any knowledge of any conspiracy.

Once their shooters got away undetected the conspiracy was a complete success and the conspirators were in the clear. Absent a confession, they were in the clear forever.

In any event, Johnson would have been President as soon as Kennedy died that alone was success in the conspiracy.

With the official investigation never seeking to solve the crime and never doing that, what is left in trying to figure it out is motive, means and opportunity. There is nothing else that can be used to reason it through. Nothing else exists for this.

Most of those who are alleged to be guilty on the basis of theories only can be easily eliminated. Like the Cubans on both sides. Or the Dragon Lady's Vietnamese. The mafia, too. Although it is not as easy to dismiss a conspiracy of Texas oil men, for instance, several questions are posed immediately. Where they willing to run the risks and lose all they in trying to Kennedy from ending their special tax benefits, when Kennedy alone could not do that? It required Congress passing a law to eliminate their special exemption. The only justification for their running such a risk would come only when there was a probability that did not exist, that their exemption would be taken away from them.

While this applies to all theorized conspirators, could the Texans alone have seen to it in advance that there would not be any real investigation? That required complete control over the local police, the FBI and the Secret Services at least, control extending to everyone in all those agencies who could have been expected to have been involved in investigation the crime.

Could they have been assured in advance that of all the many in all these policing agencies there would not be one who would become conscience-stricken and then leak the truth or confess it and who also would not leave any written records of it or exposing it? Or naming names?

Did they, for all their influence and connections, have the capability of setting Oswald up with all that required? Planting all the evidence required first that they have those who could do it and then would never say a word about it. While of all outside government who have been suspected they are those who seem to have the best possibility of conceiving it and having it done, when the planting of all the evidence that was planted and knowing all about Oswald are considered, the probability of they having been the conspirators is greatly reduced.

These conditions apply to all possible conspirators.

And in addition be able to see to it in advance that the Navy rigged an autopsy that exculpated them, pinned it on Oswald and then have seen to it that there would be no real investigation.

Nor could the Texans, the mafia or any others have arranged for those in the government who did conspire not to have any real investigation to make that decision and then say that Oswald was all alone in the assassination.

This was indispensable in seeing to it that there would not be any real investigation.

For all these prerequisites to be met it appears that all other than the military-industrial- intelligence complex can be eliminated.

It also had a much stronger motive than any others for changing national policy, which required getting rid of Kennedy.

More than any others, they had means and opportunities others did not have.

This is not to say that it is a proven fact that they conspired to have the President killed and it is not a proven fact.

But they more than others meet the traditional motive, means and opportunity standard.

And my were they overloaded with Strangelovians! As we have seen.

They are at the least the prime suspects and by the motive, means and opportunity circumstantial evidence standard they can be considered guilty.

Chapter 12: An "Irreversible Chain of Events" and "The Zone of Lunacy"

Without intending to or realizing that they were making a case of military-industrial- intelligence complex motive for assassinating President Kennedy Heather A. Purcell and James K. Galbraith do this in their scholarly and thoroughly documented study described by its title, "Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?" It was published in the quarterly of heavy-weight thinking, The American Prospect, for the fall of 1994. I received it from my historian friend Dave Wrone after I had written this book. It provides an appropriate close for this book. They draw on 21 authoritative sources they list at its conclusion, including Reeves' President Kennedy quoted above about SIOP-62. They add breath and depth to Reeves' frightening treatment of that plan. They give it added dimension. In dealing with their subject chronologically they actually build to the assassination. They make it ever starker that the Kennedy presidency that ended with his assassination was one in which he somehow frustrated the determined military plan to implement that SIOP utter ruin of the world that would have been inevitable were it not that, although thoroughly frightened by it and lacking the control civilians believed their President had exclusively over nuclear war, he somehow managed to prevent, in the phrase of the day, "mutually-assured destruction." In the course of doing this they recall what attracted some attention in 1970, Robert Kennedy's fear expressed to the Russian ambassador at the time of the Cuba Missile Crisis, that the military would overthrow Kennedy and take power. Although that did get a little attention when its source, Nikita Khrushchev's Khrushchev Remember was published (Boston, Little Brown, 1970), that was eight years after that crisis in which John Kennedy kept his military from using it to begin what would devastate the world. In 1970 very, very few were aware of the terror, the horror in the Kennedy minds during that crisis, when Robert Kennedy went to see Anatoly Dobrynin at the peak of that crisis. With what we have seen to this point in this book, there is little doubt that what I remember from it and Purcell and Galbraith quote from it is an accurate reflection of the actualities when Robert Kennedy did go see Dobrynin:

Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will . . . If the situation continues for much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American military could get out of control. (quoted from page 497 of Khrushchev's memoirs.)

That Purcell and Galbraith do not quote this until the very end of their lengthy study rather than treating it when they deal with 1962 makes it part of the unintended case of motive in the assassination. They follow it with a list of military endeavors that could have triggered nuclear war that Kennedy prevented "the last year of his life."

They then report that when Johnson assumed the Presidency he was "uneasy over the swirling rumors connecting Lee Harvey Oswald, falsely as we now know, to the KGB." Here they greatly magnify the 40 million lives that could be lost that Earl Warren told his staff about. They quote journalist David Wise "hearing Johnson tell in late 1963 of recruiting Warren" that "possibly a hundred million lives were at stake here . . ." (David Wise, The Politics of Lying, New York, Random House, 1973, page 292)

Before they get to this ending of their study Purcell and Galbraith do make it clear that the military did plan for a nuclear attack on the USSR in 1963 and that John Kennedy prevented it.

And that is motive for getting rid of John Kennedy, if not by overthrowing him, by assassinating him.

They trace this military plan back to its 1957 beginning. While there is no indication of his involvement in it, even of his knowledge of it, that was the time when the retired general of the armies Dwight Eisenhower was President and recovering from a heart attack. The planning was "for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R. . . . based on our growing lead in land-based missiles," the SIOP approach to JFK in 1961, when he was green in the Presidency and recovering from the Bay of Pigs disaster. What was presented to him is that in 1963 we would have an "outright missile superiority." They date this presentation as at the National Security Council July 20 meeting. They reproduce for the first time a declassified "EYES ONLY" memo from the LBJ Library on that meeting. Its second sentence reads:

"General Lemnitzer stated that the assumption of this year's study was a surprise attack in late 1963, preceded by a period of heightened tensions.

General Lyman Lemnitzer was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was not predicting an attack on us by the USSR.

He did not project that attack for December of 1962 "because the United States would have to few missiles" then.

The formerly "EYES ONLY" memo Purcell and Galbraith expose for the first time concluded with Kennedy's ordering them all to keep their mouths clamped closed:

The President directed that no member in attendance at the meeting disclose even the subject of the meeting.

In reporting that Kennedy was "displeased" Purcell and Galbraith quote from Arthur Schlesinger Jr's. Robert Kennedy and His Times that President Kennedy received this

annual doomsday briefing analyzing the changes of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatrick, the deputy secretary of defense, 'as though it were for a kindergarten class' . . . Finally Kennedy got up and walked out in the middle of it, and that was the end of it. We never had another one.

McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's National Security chairman, in writing about it, also used Dean Rusk's quotation of what the President said, quoted above, "And we call ourselves human beings," to reflect the impact of what the military proposed on the President.

They also refer to "numerous other accounts" saying that "All agree on Kennedy's reaction."

Among those they quote is Kennedy's White House counsel and chief speech writer Theodore Sorensen's Kennedy, (Harper & Row, 1965)

That briefing confirmed, however, the harsh facts [Kennedy] already knew: (1) that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could 'win' a nuclear war in any rational sense of the word; (2) that, except to deter an all-out Soviet attack, our threat of 'massive retaliation' to every Communist move was no longer credible, now that it invited our own destruction; and (3) that a policy of 'preemptive first strike' or 'preventive war' was no longer open to either side, inasmuch as even a surprise missile attack would trigger, before those missiles reached their targets, a devastating retaliation that neither country could risk or accept. (As I Saw It, WW Norton, 1990, New York)

Rusk did not spell out what the problem of a "stable deterrent" was in 1961. Purcell and Galbraith say it was not that we did not have enough missiles. Rather was it "the need for the Soviets to develop sufficient effective ICBM (and submarine) forces to deter us. That is an ugly and unavoidable fact. Rusk goes on a page later, with comments that appeal almost anguished, and for which his own account of the meeting gives no apparent rationale:

. . . the United States has never renounced possible first use of nuclear weapons. I personally think that the United States is committed to a second strike only, after we have received nuclear weapons on our own soil. Under no circumstances would I have participated in an order to launch a first strike, with the possible exception of a massive conventional attack on Western Europe.

In quoting a paper entitled "Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis" prepared for the President by the economist Thomas C. Schelling they say he "advocated centralization of the control of nuclear weapons in the hands of the President," where most of us believed it always had been , as a "means of preventing any use by anyone not specifically authorized . . ." (Schelling's paper was published in Foreign Relations XIV, here quoted from pages 170 and 172) His concern was that "the diffuse character of nuclear command and control in 1961 did not assure that the President in fact enjoyed the full authority over the bomb which most Americans assumed was the case. Establishing such a control became a priority for Kennedy in the months that followed."

One of Kennedy's concerns was that "miscommunication could rain down more devastation in several hours than had been wrought in all the wars in human history."

The full magnitude of this evaluation of the impending devastation may be impossible to appreciate but when it is remembered that aside from all military loses on both World War II sides and all the other civilians who were killed, the Soviets alone lost 20,000,000 people and there were 6,000,000 Jews who lost their lives to Hitler's slaughter of them alone.

Although by then the United States was "far ahead in the arms race," and this should be regarded as one of the indication of the cause of our national debt being what it is, "the military continued to press for a rapid build-up of strategic missiles. Curtis LeMay had asked for at least 2400 Minutemen (missiles); Thomas Powers of the Strategic Air Command has asked for 10,000. All were to be unleashed," as we saw in Reeves' reporting of that SIOP, "in a single paroxysm of mass annihilation," that SIOP, or Single Integrated Operation Plan . . . . SIOP was a recipe for blowing up the world."

They quote McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's National Security chief, as warning him on July 7, 1961, that the plan is so rigid if "may leave you with very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth . . . . In essence the current plan calls for shooting off everything in one shot . . . ." (Quoted from Fred M. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Stanford University Press, 1991)

"Defense Secretary McNamara and Kennedy did impose a limit of 1,000 Minutemen missiles, thus angering the Joint Chiefs," these scholars wrote, adding that "Kennedy also launched efforts to gain operational control of the nuclear force . . ."

They then quote Howard Burris, Vice President Johnson's military aide's explanation of "the military's drive for a vast U.S. nuclear build-up despite the fact that America was already far ahead, and the resistance from JFK and McNamara." What Kennedy had been told gave him only a "glimpse of the fact that our "nuclear superiority was so complete " as to make first nuclear strike successful." But despite its incompleteness it was enough to alert "Kennedy to a danger. American nuclear superiority might be so complete that rogue elements from the military and intelligence forces, seeking to precipitate an American first strike, might not feel deterred by Soviet retaliation . . . ."

And this "when the President could not be sure of his control over the nuclear button."

Purcell and Galbraith then quote Khrushchev as I did earlier to portray the fear, the horror that dominated and terrified the Kennedy brothers who gave no other overt indication of it. The authors' evaluation of the period from the Cuba missile crisis to the assassination and just after it as "critical to the survival of the world."

They draw to their close by listing far from all of what they say "we know that the last year of his life, saw (his) repeated initiatives to settle conflicts and reduce tensions." Those they do list do not include his cutting of military excesses, some referred to above with those missiles we did not need but the Strangeloves required for their purposes. They refer to "the normalization of Berlin, the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey, the no-invasion pledge on Cuba and the effort, only partially effective, to end the covert campaign (OP/MONGOOSE) against Castro, the test-ban treaty and . . . the order in October 1963 to begin a phased withdrawal from Vietnam. By November of 1963 (which is to say by the time Kennedy was assassinated) the potential for 'heightened tensions' leading to uncontrollable pressures to strike had indeed been reduced."

This in every particular is the precise opposite of what the military wanted so much and strove for so hard in its concept of the country's need and of the true patriotism as they understood it.

Purcell and Galbraith repeat that "Civilian control of Nuclear forces was no sure thing in 1961," because the military had contrived for that to be the reality.

Their analysis is that by the time he was assassinated Kennedy had succeeded in getting the out-of-control Strangeloves mostly in the military largely under control.

What then were the choices of these Strangelovian superpatriots who believed so sincerely that they best understood the nation's needs and they alone knew how to meet them -- as to them their President had proven beyond question that he did not and that he was determined to prevent their assertion of their patriotism and their dedication to their country?

Their choices were simple and but two. They could accept defeat in their determined effort that began in 1957 to wipe the USSR out and with it much of Europe and Asia at the minimum, without regard to the unprecedented disaster to us from retaliation and to all of the world from the radiation alone that attack would have poisoned us all with. We saw in the little the military let be known about what was included in their SIOP. They also saw their coming defeat in Asia already spelled out to them by JFK.

Or they could refuse to accept defeat and, patriots that they were, eliminate the cause of their defeat.

This they could not do in the next year's election. That was already apparent. Kennedy had already achieved great personal popularity. It had begun with his acceptance of responsibility for the disaster they created at the Bay of Pigs and his refusal to let them extend it to the beginning of a war that was built into the plan they gave him when he had no choice but to accept it. And it had continued to grow. There was also the certainty that with Barry Goldwater the nominee of the Republicans that alone assured Kennedy's victory at the polls.

They could be the true patriots they believed they were, the experts who saw and understood what that young upstart President neither saw nor understood as they did, and eliminate him.

Some force did and there were no other forces with this motive, none even close to it, none with their dedication, and none with their power and influence and their ability to scare the life out of those who might question them.

As I said to begin with, this is not proof that they were behind the assassination.

But it meets overwhelmingly the prime factor of the three in the traditional circumstantial- evidence standard of proof: They more than any others had the motive, the intensity of motive and the record of trying to achieve the same result by other means that no others had or could even approximate.

It should not be assumed incorrectly that our Dr. Strangeloves were capable of thinking of killings of the innocent in mega-millions only or that they did not jeopardize the lives of millions of Americans in their Cold War insanities and were not capable of the murder of individual Americans within the United States. There were reminders in our local paper the same day that the Washington Post reported that the CIA was doing nothing meaningful about what its own Inspector General evaluated as "the worst disaster in our history." (The killed U.S.--paid Soviet agents as the result of Ames' treachery then was given at 10, the "individual cases exposed" was given as "more than 34", later increased, and the "intelligence operations (that) were compromised" were increased to "more than 55.")

The case of the CIA's killing of an Army scientist where I live in Frederick was before the House Government Operations Committee along with experiments on millions of unwitting Americans, mostly by the Army.

Frank Olson was an Army scientist who also was part of a CIA cell at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. In one of their earliest experiments in mind-control and mind-bending, a major CIA Cold War project, they did kill Olson, father of three young children and a much-liked, sincere man and a fine scientist. My initial interest in this came from a CIA memo for the Warren Commission. In it the CIA evaluated, as part of a Manchurian-candidate Cold War and irrational assessment of Oswald, that in this despicable toying with human minds we were five years ahead of the Soviets. Before then the CIA had killed Olson but there is no reference to that in this memo or in any other then known record. It was only after that, however, after the family got a lawyer and was going to sue the CIA that it admitted that Olson had been killed after an overdose of LSD it claimed was entirely accidental. The CIA claimed that Olson had killed himself. In an out-of-court settlement it gave the mother Alice Wicks Olson the entirely inadequate $750,000, from which the lawyer ordinarily would have gotten a third, with which to keep and raise and then educate the three children. The CIA and the Army had even ruled that Olson's death, their murder of him in their tests, was not service connected. She did educate the children. The daughter died in an airplane crash after she was married. Eric Olson eventually became a psychologist, Nils a dentist.

By chance I knew Eric when he was a fine boy in high school. I helped two of his schoolmates with a science fair project. Those two girls wanted to duplicate Konrad Lorenz's work in imprinting. When one of them phoned me and asked for help I gave them fertile goose eggs, a small incubator, instructions on incubating and wished them well. Eric drove them to our farm and when they won first prize for the state with their success -- teaching a just-hatched gosling that its mother was a toy stuffed skunk and having it remain in that belief. Eric took the pictures I used in getting those girls the attention their project really deserved. He was a good photographer. The Baltimore Sun used his pictures, as did our local papers. After graduating college he taught school and worked on getting his doctorate in psychology. When he was teaching at the North Frederick Elementary School, with some of his students the children of friends of ours and we knew from them that he was well-liked, he asked me to speak to his fourth-graders on the assassination of President Kennedy. They were bright, well-mannered and natural children not one of whom asked a silly question, perhaps as least in part a tribute to their teacher.

In 1994, a short while after their mother died, the two sons began a well-conceived and well-planned effort to learn what they had always suspected, that their father was killed, had not died after a CIA overdose of clandestinely administered LSD. That had always been my belief. I even registered a movie script version of it in Hollywood, where a friend arranged its registration for me. The sons did not want to have their mother relive the tragedy and the taint of the tragedy inflicted on her and her children by the CIA, that Frank Olson had killed himself.

The sons had reason to believe that their father was killed because he had become disenchanted with the germ-warfare work he was doing for the CIA while an Army employee, that his disenchantment made him a "security risk" to the CIA and that it killed him to eliminate that risk.

First they arranged for a team of eminent forensic-science experts to examine the body. They then arranged to have the body exhumed and after examination to have the father and mother buried together. The initial results of the scientific examination tended to bear out their suspicion. So also did their investigation. It included those with first-hand knowledge of Olson's death in New York City, the CIA claimed by jumping out of the hotel window, who were not included in the CIA's investigation. With the CIA investigating itself, it talked the New York City police out of the investigation it should have made because they said the Olson death was a matter of "national security." Witnesses the Olsons located said that the CIA's account of how Olson went through that window was not possible. These witnesses included the hotel's night manager, who saw the body on the sidewalk before Olson expired and who then examined the room.

The initial examination of Olson's body disclosed injuries impossible in a 13-story fall in which he landed on his feet, confirmed by the damage to them and to his legs. That did not break the bones in his head that was broken.

As our local papers reported September 29, 1994, Eric arranged to testify before the House of Representatives Government Operations subcommittee on legislation and national security the day before. Eric, then 49 testified, in the words of the news story, that "a former agent who worked with an intelligence team headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, one of two CIA agents responsible for secretly dosing Dr. (Frank) Olson with LSD, . . . ' has confirmed that the members of that small group (of CIA agents) all believed that my father was murdered, he said."

Those who have not made detailed studies of our spookeries may find it hard to believe that the CIA actually did murder people. Naturally, it and other spookeries do not ordinarily advertise their murders. But the fact is that when the CIA called its former officer, John Lemon Hart back from retirement to study its records of its abuse of the defected KGB official Yuri Nosenko. Nosenko told the FBI what the CIA did not want believed about Oswald, that the KGB suspected he was an American "sleeper" agent, that he was anti-Soviet and a lousy shooter. Hart then testified to the House assassins committee for the CIA in 1978. He attested to finding handwritten records in which a CIA official deliberated ways of getting rid of Nosenko, destroying his credibility or both. Hart testified that on one extreme what was considered was driving Nosenko crazy. The CIA's abuse of Nosenko for three years would have done that to most people. On the other extreme, the plan considered was flying Nosenko over the ocean and throwing him into it.

In Anne Marie Kuhns Walko's ransacking of the CIA's records disclosed in 1993 she found a record in which the CIA had that done. It flew a man and a woman out of Miami in a small plane and deep-sixed them in the Watergater's term, threw them into the ocean.

Eric Olson's indictment of those involved is of broader application in what the government was doing:

"My father's case, still unresolved after four decades, illustrates what can happen when civil liberties are violated in the name of national security research,' Dr. Olson said. 'Once one starts down the dangerous path of poisoning one's own citizens in order to develop weapons allegedly need to protect them, one enters a zone of lunacy where anything is possible, where sadists can disguise their maliciousness as patriotic duty.'"

That same day the same local papers quoted the testimony of the assistant comptroller general of the General Accounting Office. He testified "it's clear that this research continues . . . ." In the partial account of the past of this experimenting with living Americans by the CIA and by the Army it is reported that "Between 1940 and 1974, experiments were performed on at least a half-million individuals, including 210,000 exposed to radiation . . . . In addition Army researchers sprayed zinc cadmium sulphide -- a chemical now associated with cancer -- over more than 200 cities . . . . which include Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit and Springfield, Ill." It was earlier disclosed that other such experiments with living Americans included San Francisco and that the subways or several large cities that were dosed with germs.

In addition to other agencies' experiments with living people, some at a Canadian university for the CIA resulting in a lawsuit and at least one death, "the GAO found that some 100 people received LSD at five universities through tests financed by the Air Force."

In earlier years a few other such so-called "tests" on our own people by the Army here and abroad did receive attention, some in courts, some on TV.

Or, as John Kennedy said when he walked out on the briefing on how the military was going to wipe a major part of the world's people out with a nuclear attack he then he could neither prevent nor control, "and we call ourselves the human race."

Millions of Americans had their lives and health experimented with by the military and by the CIA without their permission being sought or obtained. An incalculably large number of them suffered, never learning the cause. Many lives were ruined. Some lives, like that of Frank Olson, were taken. All in the name of "national security."

The CIA did kill Frank Olson. Whether or not its people threw him out of that New York City hotel window. I came to believe that almost 20 years ago after studying the CIA's reports on his death. Its reports of its investigation of itself. They were a sham and not a very good sham. But then the CIA expected perpetual secrecy and all it needed was a cover story that would never have to be shown anyone, only referred to. The scenario synopsis I registered I titled, The Defenstration of Henry Cott. That script synopsis was based on Olson's having been thrown out that window. Almost 20 years later his sons developed strong confirmation in their investigation that began with the forensic scientist's examination of the exhumed body.

However it happened, it was cold-blooded murder, as is an assassination. The only different is in the victim of the murder. Olson's is far from the only one.

On its face that Olson jumped out of that 13th floor window in New York's Hotel Statler seemed to be impossible.

After the forensic scientists headed by Dr. James E. Stupps, George Washington University professor of law and forensic science issued their preliminary report a number of newspapers got interested. They published stories in June and July, 1994.

As Eric told the Los Angeles Times' Jeff Leeds after spending a night in that room and making a careful examination of it, the window has a large radiator in front of it. He said, "It would have been very difficult to fall or even jump out. You'd have to take a flying leap and dive through it."

Without breaking the glass? With the window closed?

Leeds and The Washington Post's Brian Mooar report identically on a phone conversation. The Post's July 12 accounts are slightly longer:

"After his death, instead of calling an ambulance or police, the CIA agent in Olson's room, Robert Lashbrook, reportedly called a number on Long Island, (Armond) Pastore (the hotel's night manager) said the conversation was overheard by a hotel operator, who relayed it to him.

"Well, he's gone," Lashbrook reportedly said.

"That's too bad," the other man replied, and both hung up.

Reached by telephone at his California home yesterday, Lashbrook said the conversation never took place.

"'If I'd said what they claim I said,' Lashbrook said, 'do you think that the police would have thought it was a suicide and let things go?'"

What Lashbrook did not say is that his own CIA talked the police out of investigating what it persuaded the police was a "national security" case and that the autopsy was so superficial, based on the belief it was a suicide, no pictures or X-rays were made. But as the examination of the exhumed body shows, there were bone damages entirely inconsistent with suicide that are not mentioned in that so-called New York autopsy.

In his earlier story the Post published June 3, Mooar wrote:

"'I never had the opinion that he jumped from the window," said Armond Pastore, the night manager at the Hotel Statler that night in 1953. 'Being in the hotel business my whole life, I never heard of anybody jumping through a closed window with the shade pulled down. Nobody I've worked with ever knew of somebody killing himself like that.'

"Pastore, now 75 and living in Melbourne, Fla., said he has been haunted by the death for 40 years.

"'I remember the whole thing like it was yesterday, clear as a picture. He was still breathing and I leaned down real close to him. . . . He was trying real hard to speak, . . . I never forgot that look in his eyes; he definitely had a message he was trying to tell me, but you could only guess what it was.'"

The only CIA statement I've seen is that it had not seen the forensic pathology report.

If by any chance what seems to be a solid case of killing Olson is not that, the CIA still killed him both by administering that overdose of LSD and then by what it thereafter did and did not do.

It did not take him to a psychiatric hospital immediately. And then it decided to send him to New York, for examination by Dr. Harold Abrahamson, a supposed authority on LSD in those days. Olson had been untreated and at his Frederick home for several days before the CIA decided to send him to New York, to Abrahamson. This despite the fact that he was a visibly very disturbed and troubled man from its ODing him. Lashbrook was sent to accompany Olson. He was in such shape he could hardly have gone any place on his own in any event. This introduced an entirely new case, of gross negligence, that troubled me from the time I first studied those CIA records. After the body was exhumed I told Nils about this when Eric was not available by phone in the belief that if they go to court they can use it. They were too young to have been aware of it.

A superhighway was being built between Washington and Frederick. Work on it began at the Frederick end, however, in sections of about five miles each. As each section from Frederick was completed, it was opened for traffic. Where it ended during that initial construction (it had been widened considerably since then) there was a cloverleaf with a connection to the old narrower highway it was bypassing. I used it throughout the years of its construction.

When the road construction was completed to Rockville, which is a few miles north west of the District of Columbia line and is the Montgomery County, Maryland seat of government, traffic was fed onto a Rockville that in a few city blocks joined that old road. Because the CIA took Olson to the Washington rather than the Baltimore train station, which would have saved about an hour on the trip to New York, there is the suggestion that Olson was driven to Washington for a purpose I do not recall being mentioned in the CIA records. But in driving through Rockville the CIA car and those in it aside from Olson were only one city block from a psychiatric hospital than enjoyed an excellent reputation, Chestnut Lodge.

Had Olson been taken there he would have been watched with care and treated by the best professionals in the area.

The negligence, if that is what caring more about keeping the CIA's dirtier secrets secret than it cared about Olson was, it is what also caused Olson's death.

And, irony or ironies, after his too-long stay in New York during which, untreated, Olson did deteriorate further, the CIA then decided to take him all the way back to of all places, that same Chestnut Lodge Sanitarium!

His whitewashed and covered-up death was the early morning before he was to have been taken to Chestnut Lodge.

And that, of course, is a mere coincidence.

There is no way of knowing how many lives were cost by the CIA's experimenting with unwitting humans. Its Cold War lunacies are like those of the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, if vastly different in the kinds of experiments it did. But in principle it is the same as what Mengele was a war criminal for doing.

At least one other death from CIA experiments on humans with LSD, what it ODed Olson with, was later taken to court. The CIA settled that case.

There also is no way of knowing how many killings the CIA's Aldrich Ames was responsible for but from the available information it is quite a few, all of whom were CIA spies or sources. As indicated earlier, the CIA drizzled out as little as it thought it could get away with and then saw to it that all of its many officers who were so indifferent and made it possible got away with it. That the CIA's only releases of information understated this enormously was reported by the Senate intelligence committee on November 2, 1994.

As Walter Pincus' story in the next day's Post begins, ". . . Ames has admitted to betraying more than 100 U.S. and allied government intelligence operations." The committee report "also says," Pincus continued, "the former CIA officer knew about several hundred other operations that he may have passed to Moscow . . . ."

To protect himself Ames first turned in "several KGB agents working for the United States . . . in order to make sure they did not turn him in."

Asked by the committee's Senator Dennis DeConcini (Democrat of Arizona), "did you identify the two KGB people in the (USSR's Washington) embassy [working for the CIA]?" Ames responded, "In the embassy? Yes."

Asked "did it occur to you that they might be killed?", Ames replied, "Yes, it did."

There is no way of knowing how many people Ames had killed, knowing that they would be killed. There were so many of them who disappeared and whose disappearance was known to intelligence agencies the number was so great it scared Ames himself to the point where he complained about it to the KGB. He feared it might lead to his exposure.

Under a heading "A DAMAGE ASSESSMENT" the Washington Post listed six "highlights" of that intelligence committee report. The first reads, "The first 10 U.S.A. agents caught and executed as a result of his betrayal were among the CIA's most valuable spies in the Soviet bloc."

A year after Ames became a Soviet spy, Pincus writes, "when the CIA's own Soviet counterintelligence chief told his senior management that '45 Soviet and East European cases and two technical operations . . . . were known to have been compromised or were evidencing problems' the information was not passed to the Congress. Instead the legislators were told the losses were under control."

As the Olson and the Ames cases illustrate, and they are illustrations not by any means a full accounting, which there can never be, killing is not unknown to the CIA as an institution or to its people. It and they do go in for cold-blooded murder. Of this we have seen other illustrations, like trying to figure out how to kill Nosenko, who in fact was a prime intelligence coup for the CIA only its crazies refused to believe it. Or that Miami case of dropping people into the sea from a chopper. There were many reports of the CIA doing that in Vietnam to those it suspected were Viet Cong. And then, of course, all those plots against Castro and other heads of state.

With this only part of its records of murdering, directly and indirectly, is there any reason not to believe that with this their concept of patriotism those in it could not have considered getting rid of the President who opposed some of what it was up to and some of its policies, such as in Vietnam, to be a dedication to patriotism?

The CIA and its people are no less patriotic than those at the top in our military.

The military that along with the CIA treated thousands and thousands of Americans like a timid and modest Mengele would have and actually planned to wipe out all life in a major part of the world, including major populated areas, with many millions of certain and agonizing deaths for those not instantaneous the inevitable result, and when they could experiment with living Americans and kill some in those experiments for "national security," is there anything of which they are not capable?

Including disposing of the one man who stood in their way, the one man who frustrated their plans for mega-millions of murders in their concept of what our "national security" required of them.

When this is considered along with what the military did to take control of the autopsy; and then see to it that the autopsy was unworthy of a Bowery bum; and then lied and repeatedly committed perjury about it, the serious felony of perjury, the possibility cannot be ignored.

More so because no others equal them this in motive.

At the moment of the assassination and for a short time after it the fate and the future of the world, not only of this country were in question.

In the midst of all this Strangelovian lunacy it was saved by the lunacy of no less a paranoid political Neanderthal than FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Had it not been that the since-disbanded Texas-based 112th Army intelligence unit told the Dallas police immediately that Oswald had defected to the Soviets and was a Red in a short time that would have emerged anyway. But that short time may have led to the world's survival.

(Oswald had been careful to initiate a defection without defecting and as we have seen he was not a Red -- he was anti-U.S. Communist and anti-Soviet, even within the USSR.)

Although it escaped any public comment and is little known the vaunted head of the FBI got hysterical as soon as he heard that JFK had been assassinated. For at least a week he reflected this hysteria in virtuoso ignorance and confusion about the facts as his own FBI had them and, anxious for the new President to believe that as usual he was on top of everything he kept giving Johnson misinformation some so ignorant it seems impossible that the man who had headed the FBI from its inception -- for 40 years -- could have spoken so stupidly. Virtually the only thing he had straight was spelling Oswald's name.

From what is not still suppressed Hoover's hysteria, paranoia and detachment from reality were still running full-tilt a week after the assassination.

It was Dave Wrone who put the case of Hoover hysteria together from its own records I had obtained from it in FOIA lawsuits, and it was Wrone who first saw that in the short period after the assassination Hoover may have saved the world without the remotest notion that he had.

As I read my way through the quarter of a million JFK assassination records I got by a series of FOIA lawsuits that extended for more than a decade, while keeping those records exactly as I got them for history's record I had extra copies made of some for special filing in what I call my "subject" file. In going over them and making copies for his own work and his teaching Wrone perceived when he put his copies together that Hoover was farout wild. He collected copies of those FBI records in a separate file he called "Hoover's Hysteria."

On November 29, 1963, a week after the assassination and the day Johnson appointed his Warren Commission, according to the tapes and transcripts of Johnson's tapping and taping his own phone conversations disclosed the middle of 1994, Hoover gave him an account of the new and greater magic he attributed to that bullet which came to be known as the magic bullet. Not without cause! In the Commission's evidence it is Exhibit 399, or it also has come to be known as Bullet 399. Hoover told Johnson it had hit President Kennedy's head and then fell out and was recovered. In the official story there was but one shot to the President's head and it exploded and blew a major part of the right side of the President's head out, hitting bone as it entered and as it left.

Relatively long before that Hoover phone conversation with Johnson the FBI lab had completed its examinations of that bullet. It examined the bullet microscopically and it did a spectrographic analysis of it. It did not test the bullet to determine whether it held any traces of human tissue or blood. (Whitewash, page 163)

"When asked to explain some very fine lines visible on the bullet," as I wrote at the point before February 15, 1965, "Frazier explained that if they did not come from inside the barrel of the rifle they could have been made by 'even a piece of coarse cloth, leather . . . (which leaves) . . . infinitesimal scratches which when enlarged sufficiently actually look like marks on the bullet.' This bullet, according to the Commission's theory, shattered the Governor's fifth rib and his wrist . . . . There were no questions to elicit information about bone markings and no such intelligence was volunteered."

Without question, and in all the many test firings, bullets bear the marks of any bones they hit, bones this bullet is said to have demolished. This bullet that the FBI testified was virtually unmutillated. It had no major marks, none from hitting any bone.

Although the FBI and the Commission do not agree on the career each imputed to this bullet, both agree that it did not hit the President in his head and that it did cause a non-fatal injury to his body. So, a week after the assassination, Hoover told President Johnson that it had hit President Kennedy in his head and after exploding in his head fell out of it intact and in virtually pristine condition. With not a single bone mark on it! That late Hoover was this far out of contact with the established facts and with reality.

So not only did Hoover have the history of that super-magical bullet all twisted and entirely wrong, what he told Johnson about it was absolutely impossible. Yet Hoover had the results of his own lab's testing of that bullet the day after the assassination and on that day signed a report on his Lab's work he sent to the Dallas police.

Here was Hoover, who has spent his 40 years in heading the FBI convincing the media and the people that his was the best of such agencies and he the best of all possible heads of any of them, and when the President was killed, for all the FBI's intelligence operations and reputation of being on top of everything, he and it were caught by surprise. They knew pretty close to immediately that they did not really know what happened except that the President had been assassinated.

That, Hoover knew, he could not possible admit and retain his reputation and that of his FBI.

It was when he learned very shortly after Oswald was arrested by the Dallas police that they had also identified him as a Red, that Hoover at once faced both a serious problem and a solution to his serious problem.

He joined the Dallas police in calling Oswald a Red but he added, no doubt an instant vision if not an instant realization of what his reputation and that of his FBI required, that Oswald was entirely alone. No conspiracy. No KGB. No USSR involvement. (Yet at the same time the FBI captioned its records on this in terms of a conspiracy involving the USSR, Cuba or both.)

Hoover let that be known the day of the assassination. So from that moment those in the government who had to know knew that Hoover had decided that there had been no conspiracy. Had he admitted that there been a conspiracy he would have had to acknowledge, he knew, what would have reflected on him and on his FBI. But the FBI could not penetrate a single man so it could not be faulted for not knowing about the assassination in advance -- because it allegedly was the work of a lone nut.

In fact, Hoover later boasted he had his instant vision they very day of the assassination when he was interviewed by William Manchester for his book The Death of a President. (New York, Harper & Row, 1967) His then Number 4 man, Cartha DeLoach, was his notetaker. DeLoach set this forth in his lengthy typed account of that interview at several points. (62- 109069 Not Recorded, 6/4/64)

With all those Strangelovians so anxious to nuclear bomb the hell out of the USSR and other countries when they had no legitimate reasons, with Oswald labelled a Red they had their excuse. But before they could do anything, Hoover let it be known that the USSR was not behind the assassination because Oswald was all alone in it. That eliminated any possible justification for launching all those thousands of nuclear bombs and starting World War III which, as we have seen, was the military's most ardent desire.

It is by his declaration before he knew anything really factual about the assassination at all that there had been no conspiracy, that the USSR was not behind the assassination, that Hoover may well have saved the world from its worst disaster, a disaster in which retaliatory nuclear bombs also would have fallen on the United States. Hoover was in such haste to protect himself and his FBI from criticism he eliminated the military's excuse for SIOP-sing much of the world into oblivion before the military could get together and decide to seize the opportunity the assassination provided them.

There is no way of knowing whether the military did see the assassination as a means of implementing the devastation it had planned for that very time or whether any at the top in the military deliberated using it as an excuse, as justification for their loosing all that destruction laid out in their SIOP-62. All that can be said is that the assassination did provide what they could have used to justify it, to make it appear to be necessary.

Whether or not the military did see this possibility, the fact remains that of all those who can be believed wanted the President eliminated and with that eliminate his policies with which the military had such violent disagreement, the military had by far the strongest motive, means and opportunity in the assassination.

We may never know because, as I begin NEVER AGAIN! by proving with once-
suppressed official documents, there was a government conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself that was agreed to as soon as Oswald was killed and it was known there would be no trial. It also was another official decision that there was no "Red" conspiracy.

It must not be forgotten that at that very moment -- when it knew there would be no trial because Oswald had been killed -- that the Navy destroyed the autopsy report prepared in the expectation it would have to survive examination at trial. The Navy then prepared and substituted for the destroyed autopsy report the misbegotten travesty of an autopsy report it knew would not be examined and cross-examined at any public trial. This substituted Navy autopsy report, supported by Navy perjury, was the basis for the knowingly false official "solution" that Oswald was the lone assassin, that there had not been any conspiracy to kill the President when all the evidence was and is that he was killed as the end product of a conspiracy.

A conspiracy for which the military had the strongest and most compelling of motives.

Chapter 13: "The Politics of Lying" and "The Press Box Mentality"

"What can one say at the end of a book like this?" is the question I faced with each of my eight published books and the three, including this one, not published.

That the government lied to us when our President was killed; it lied intending to lie; it continues to lie about it and about the government's non-investigation of the crime itself while improperly interfering with those who criticize it is not new, it and these lies are not news to the media.

That the assassination was a great subversion is never mentioned and thus the people are not given reason to understand and know that it was.

That it was a coup d'etat is also not news to the media because that also in more than 30 years it has not yet told the people, the people who in our system of supposed freedom through self-government are to be the controlling force.

That when the President was assassinated and his assassination was supposedly investigated by the government that succeeded his the media did not meet its obligations to us and to itself does not need being said. This is implicit, explicit or both in all my books. It is proven in all of them by the lied-about official evidence itself. But because the media has ignored them, all but the tiny fraction of Americans have no way of knowing this. Yet it is knowledge the people require if our system of government is to work as intended, with an electorate informed by the media.

This is to say, to put it bluntly, that whether or not the media saw to it that those who pulled this coup d'etat off got away with it, the media did see to it that the government did get away with what I have termed a "whitewash" and a "cover up" of the crime, of the coup.

And that, too, is a great subversion. It is one that endangered and still endangers us and our democratic system. It is another step toward an authoritarian society, a step in addition to the one that resulted from the assassination and from the de facto government conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself. I begin NEVER AGAIN! by proving with government records that had been kept secret. These are among those I got by all those lawsuits I filed and fought under the Freedom of Information Act.

All of this and more was made possible by official secrecy, the official secrecy that is the curse of freedom and of a democratic society.

There is nothing in this book that was secret, nothing that was not public, nothing not more readily available to the media than to me, an aged and infirm octogenarian.

Yet for all its wealth, power and resources, for all its highly-educated and experienced reporters, editors and pundits none of this that was so readily available to the media, more readily available to it than to me, none of it has been mentioned by the media.

It has not troubled the people with the knowledge that their freedom, their democratic system, was and is endangered by this assassination that was a coup or that the coup was protected by the government. Or that this made the government part of the danger to our freedom and to our democratic form of government.

When the President who became President by this assassination appointed a commission of inquiry he gave it a political composition that is without precedent in our history. That it was unprecedented in this way was obvious but the entire media found that not worthy of mention and not worthy of questioning. So again the people had no way of understanding that or its meanings.

Under our system the party in power, which is put there by the people, has the responsibility that goes with that power, and this, too, is the will of the people. This means it is always the majority on all appointive bodies, as any presidential commission always is. But President Johnson, whatever his motive -- and he left no known record of his motive -- appointed his Commission to investigate the assassination that made him President he gave the other party, the Republicans, the responsibility for what that Commission decided and reported.

He appointed a seven-man commission. Five of its seven members were Republicans.

This alone is without precedent in our history.

Of the two, that small minority from the majority Democratic Party, Johnson appointed two who not only were not friends of the assassinated President -- they did not agree with him politically. They were, in fact, strongly opposed to many of his policies.

While most of these seven were politically from conservative to very conservative in their views and records, and thus whatever they would report the conservatives could not object to as the Republicans, who were the large majority, also could not, Johnson was careful to have had as chairman the liberal Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren. Having Warren the Commission's chairman effectively immobilized the liberals, especially of the eastern intellectual community.

In short, by his departure from all precedent Johnson saw to it that there would be little likelihood that what the Commission concluded and reported would not be accepted.

What is almost entirely unknown but what I prove at the very beginning of NEVER AGAIN! is that Johnson appears with little question to have approved the de facto government conspiracy not to investigate the crime. That was five days before he appointed his commission, only two days after the assassination.

Whether or not this is one of the reasons the contracted publisher has seen to it that NEVER AGAIN! remains unpublished almost two years, as I write this, after I delivered the manuscript, I let the full details await their appearance in context in that book. Here I say only that in addition to getting the proof of the conspiracy from those government records I got by all those difficult, long-lasting and costly lawsuits, I also got a few other proofs. There was supposedly, full disclosure in response to the delayed compliance with the law requiring full disclosure of all assassination information that was passed in 1992, these few records I refer to were not included in those boasted-of "full" releases.

However, by this I do not mean and I do not believe that it means that Johnson himself was involved in the assassination. He was its beneficiary and that alone created suspicions; but that he was the beneficiary does not mean that he was party to it. I know of no official evidence justifying this suspicion and I know of no evidence of any kind made public by anyone at all -- and I mean evidence, not conjecture -- that justifies this suspicion.

Why he departed from the practice of our entire political life from the time our Founding Fathers created our government and our system of government is a legitimate question. But there is no answer to it. It remains a question. Of the possible answers other than that Johnson was part of the conspiracy the most obvious is that he wanted the country to be satisfied and to preserve tranquility.

Before he appointed his Commission he knew what the FBI would conclude in response to his charge to it -- within a few hours of the assassination -- to investigate and report on the crime. J. Edgar Hoover kept him fully informed on what the FBI had concluded and would say. Even though Hoover never had the supposed facts he gave Johnson straight, Johnson knew. From the records of what he told Johnson in the disclosed transcripts of their telephone conversations and from those of its records the FBI disclosed to me this is without any question at all. That Hoover had decided immediately that Oswald was the lone assassin is unequivocal. Hoover reached this determination the afternoon of the crime, as we have seen, as soon as he got the first report that Oswald was allegedly some kind of "Red." Which he wasn't, but that made no difference. Johnson knew that nobody in political life would or could expect to survive contradicting Hoover. So he knew that his Commission would conclude as Hoover had seen to it that it would conclude before he appointed his Commission.

The Commission itself confirmed this in one of its first executive sessions, the one called in an emergency after the end of the working day January 22, 1964. That was before the Commission was fully organized or held its first hearing.

That the composition of this Presidential Commission was unique in our history, so radical and unprecedented a departure from the practice of our entire life as a nation, was to the media not worthy of mentioning. Thus the people had no way of knowing that at the very outset of what was to be the official investigation of the assassination its conclusions were rigged in advance.

That the media found this unworthy of any mention, leave alone complaint, is the media's own self-characterization as an adjunct of government in the time of crisis.

There was nothing about this assassination and the official supposed investigation of it that was so very wrong that the media did not accept and treat as the best of possible practice in the best of possible worlds.

The Commission decided to precede in complete secrecy. Not a peep of protest from the media. Had there been, had the Commission been forced to hold its hearings in the traditional American way, in public, it could not have foisted off on the trusting people a fraud for its conclusions.

Had there been a trial, that would have been entirely in public and the media would fighting vigorously for a seat when seating space would have been so much less than the media demand for space at it.

How atypical it was for the media to accept total secrecy in the hearings of the investigation of the assassination of the President, the most terrible and subversive of crimes in a country like ours, is illustrated by what happened 31 years later, when it went to court to prevent even the slightest bit of secrecy in a trial that had not yet begun.

In 1994 the prominent personality, TV telecaster and hall-of-fame football hero O.J. Simpson was accused of killing his estranged wife and a friend of hers by the Los Angeles police. The media that was so atypically without any investigation of if its own when its President was killed went crazy reporting all the prejudicial leaks that could have come only from the Simpson prosecution, reporting them unquestioningly no matter how unlikely they appeared to be. All the rumors, all the fabrications of those who sought attention, all that was made up by those who expected to be and who were paid for their investigations. There was nothing too incredible for the media not to report extensively.

When over this danger to the possibility of a fair trial the judge threatened to cut off the telecasting of the pre-trial proceedings he had permitted the media was loud in its outrage. The judge then permitted the telecasting to continue. Even though the networks discontinued live telecasting of those proceedings when advertisers complained about their loss of advertising time and threatened to cancel their contracts.

Then there was a hasty, sensational book purporting to hold evidence of the crime itself. It appeared when the impanelling of the jury had just begun. The judge, seeking to protect the jurors from that exposure and conditioning that could also endanger Simpson's right to a fair trial, closed some of the questioning of potential jurors. Not only was the media outraged over that, as it had done earlier in the proceedings the media hired counsel and went to court to require all the questioning of all potential jurors to be entirely in public and with the media present.

The judge backed down immediately.

In that murder case, as it had before, the media protested vigorously over even the slightest secrecy and as it had done before it went to court to end even that little bit of secrecy.

But when the President was assassinated, the media not only conducted no investigation of its own, which was not normal media practice, when it was barred from all of the proceeding of the investigating Commission it was entirely without protest or question of any kind.

It did not ask why what was the need for secrecy. There was no such legitimate need at all, as was obvious.

That secrecy could only have been for dishonest purposes. This also was obvious.

But there was no media complaint or protest of any kind and for that reason alone the Commission was able to perpetrate the fraud it began intending to perpetrate, as its own records I obtained and published prove. The media ignored those records, too.

The media that was outraged and went to court in the Simpson and in other similar cases was content for there to be total secrecy in the supposed investigation of the assassination of the President.

Had it acted as in its tradition it had always acted, all of history since then would have been different. It would not have been possible to perpetrate this monumental, this entirely unprecedented official fraud if those proceedings had been in public. This is one of the means by which the media, for all the world like a monolith, assured the success of the perpetration of that official fraud.

Not only did this Commission precede entirely in secret, it classified even the verbatim stenographic transcripts of all the testimony of its hearings -- what it was going to and did publish! This meant that the media had no access to any of the testimony before the Commission published all of it at one time a year after the assassination.

There was no media complaint about that, either.

The Commission had no authority to classify anything at all. This is clear in its public and published empowerment, in the documents that created it.

This also was never mentioned by the media when it was the only reason the media, which had been excluded from covering the hearings, was also prevented from studying and reporting on the testimony that had been taken in secret, secret from it and from the people.

What a self-portrayal of our crusading media by the media itself!

What the media did not know but could have learned it if had regarded the assassination of the President and its official investigations as so important as being present at all proceedings in a sensational murder trial is that the Commission held its executive sessions in such secrecy it barred its own staff from them! And then, lacking the authority, it classified all those transcripts, TOP SECRET.

So, protected by improper and entirely unnecessary and unjustified secrecy, the Commission prepared and issued its Report. That Report is one that cannot survive any critical examination of it at all. Given three days to read and prepare to report on it, the media instead of giving it any critical examination, went into ecstacies over it. There was no criticism of it at all. It was hailed as the best of possible Reports, as the certain answer to all questions. So much did the media constitute itself an arm of government, the propaganda arm, the Associated Press, which serves most of the nation's media and much of that of the rest of the world, actually used as its major story on the release of that report its first chapter titled "Summary and Conclusions."

The media had already reported what refuted the entire Report but it did not recall that or report it or ask questions about it. For example, the Commission concluded that Oswald, the lone assassin, fired all the shots fired in the assassination from above and behind the President. But at the press conference of the Dallas doctors who sought to treat and who examined the President in the Parkland Hospital emergency room, the press conference held within minutes of the pronouncement of death, stated three times that the President had been shot from the front. The surgeon who stated this was confirmed by the hospital's chief of neurological surgery. Virtually every paper in the country printed this. The Associated Press had it in its story. The White House disclosed the official transcript of that press conference promptly. It was the first press conference of the Johnson administration. And the doctors who reported that the President's wound in the front of his neck was an entrance wound are the only doctors who saw that wound before it was altered by their emergency procedures.

The media knew that the FBI had filed its supposedly definitive report of its investigation Johnson ordered it to make prior to his creation of the Commission. If the media had asked to see that FBI report, normal in reporting, it would have learned that it was withheld, that it could not see that report.

But if it had seen that report, it would have seen that the FBI and the Commission disagreed radically on the assassination shooting. Both could not have been right. (In fact neither was.) The FBI report makes it clear that the FBI believed the Commission's account of that shooting was impossible. Basic to the Report's account of the crime is that of the only three shots allegedly fired one bullet (the one that came to be known by those who do not agree with the official solution as the "magic bullet") had inflicted all seven non-fatal injuries on the President and on Texas Governor John B. Connally. So, knowing this to be impossible, the FBI merely ignored the fact that one shot had missed. Because in the time permitted nobody in the world, not the country's best shots in tests for the Commission, had been able to duplicate the shooting attributed to Oswald, the Commission and the FBI had to state that only three shots has been fired. Even though those best of all shooters had not be able to duplicate the shooting attributed to the duffer Oswald. If the FBI acknowledged that there had been a shot that missed it would have acknowledged that there had been a conspiracy and that all officialdom decided in advance of any investigation not to say. This also is documented with official records in NEVER AGAIN! and as it is relating to the Commission in my Post Mortem's first chapter.

If the media had asked to see that FBI report that is the Commission's first record in its numbered files it would have found in it an FBI picture of the front of the President's shirt collar that proves beyond question that no bullet went through it, although the FBI's and the Commission's "solutions" require that a bullet have exited through it. That bullet is also required to have gone through the knot of the President's tie. But of the utmost in deliberate professional incompetence that the FBI's pictures of that tie are, it is without question in even these designedly poor pictures that no such thing happened. There is no hole in the knot of that tie.

What should the media have demanded to see the FBI report?

Because the Commission's Report states and in so stating attributed still another magically property to that bullet, that it left no bullet traces on the front of the President's shirt or his tie while depositing them on the back of his shirt and his jacket.

And this also the media did not report.

I have written many entire books on what the official evidence shows and means but the media accepted and praised the Report, what I have always referred to in Orwell's words as "the official mythology." But what was obvious to one man was not obvious to the many, many thousands of reporters, editors and columnists of all of our media because they did not seek the truth that is in those records.

And thus, because the media failed itself and failed us at the same time, as true to Orwell happened, the official mythology became the official fact that remains unquestioned by the media after more than 31 years as I write this.

How was all of this possible, how could the official mythology become and remain official fact, and how could the media continue with this fiction?

It is not only because for all the world as though completely controlled by the government the media fell into a Zieg Heil! lockstep with the government and thus failed itself and the country in not meeting and serving its essential and traditional role in our country.

It was because of official secrecy and the media's uncomplaining acceptance of that official secrecy at the time of the assassination, throughout the life of the Commission and when the Commission issued its Report. It was not until two months after the Report was released that the Commission released the officially estimated 10,000,000 words of its appendix of testimony and exhibits the supposed back stopping of its Report. Before release to the general public the media had only five days in which to understand and report on 10,000,000 words in 26 large volumes. It did not complain.

If the media had done what it should have done and avoided doing, it would have learned - - could not have avoided learning -- that the assassination was the end product of a conspiracy.

When I say that the assassination was the end product of a conspiracy I am not engaging in any kind of theory. The official fact that I brought to light beginning in my first book, which was completed mid-February, 1965, leaves it without question that the crime was beyond the capability of any one man and thus was a conspiracy. Not a word of what I have published on this, and I include it in all my books, has been contradicted by the government or by anyone else. There is no refutation of it in any of the hundreds of thousands of pages of government records I obtained by those FOIA lawsuits. That the assassination of the President was by a conspiracy is beyond question in the official misrepresented official evidence itself.

Beginning with this supposed official proof of the validity of the Report, those 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits, then including what I found in the Commission's files that it did not publish, and then what I rescued from official oblivion in all those records I obtained by all those FOIA lawsuits, I used only what the media could have had and did not want, official evidence, in the books I published before this one.

In this book, in addressing circumstantial evidence as lawyers address it, I have used in addition what those in official positions learned because of their official responsibilities to bring together some of this circumstantial evidence. They are official sources.

All of this and more was more readily accessible to the media than to me.

If the media had wanted to report it. Any or all of the media but especially those who specialize in political matters. Media specializations include intelligence and military matters as well as official wrong-doings and lying. Then, too, there were and there are all those TV specials. Preparing them requires the work of many competent specialists and great amounts of time. But what I have done in this book was not done by any of them or by those who write books.

Here I bring together for the first time, I re-emphasis, with nothing secret, nothing private at all, only what was always more accessible to the media than it was to me.

I emphasize also that the media was able to do this better and more definitively than I. It can also draw on official and other sources. I cannot.

That it did not, that it continued to fail in its support of the official mythology on a crime of this magnitude is a greater danger to us than was their media to those who lived in the authoritarian societies of both extremes. In those societies the people knew their media was the voice of their governments. Knowing that they were prepared not to trust what their media told them. But our people, knowing that from the first days of our existence as a nation our media is independent of and cannot be interfered with by the government, had no reason to believe that the media is for all practical purposes an arm of errant government on questions like the assassinations and their investigations.

Popular mistrust of both the government and the media go hand in hand in this country since John Kennedy was assassinated. In the late 1960s I spoke to many audiences, in person and on the radio and TV, from one end of the country to the other. Beginning then and ever since then I got more than 20,000 letters from strangers and innumerable phone calls, also from strangers. These expressions to me, and because they are to me reflect my work on the assassinations, have the assassinations and how the government and the media treated them as the greatest single cause of popular mistrust in both. I believe that in fact the assassination is the second greatest cause of this permeating mistrust over those years, that the first was Vietnam. But with the assassination and the government and media handling of it not far behind as a major cause of this now well recognized mistrust.

Mistrust that is more than merely earned, more than merely justified.

That is the healthy side of it.

The unhealthy side is that there is little the people can do about it.

Nor have those who are flattered in being referred to merely as "revisionists" succeeded, except with the media, which extols them and their faulty works.

Not from the reflections of it to me in my heavy mail and many calls from strangers.

Not long before I write this I had a letter from a boy of only 10 years. He ended his letter, speaking of John Kennedy, "he left us something." This child spoke for just about all who wrote and write and phone me. Despite the rewriting of his history and of that of our country by these revisionists whose Orwellian mistreatment of our and his history makes them wealthy and famous, love for and love of and respect for and appreciation as John Kennedy of President is clear in those expressions to me that for the most part by far are from those who make it a point of telling me they were not yet born when he was assassinated or how very young they then were. Most of the older Americans never did believe the official mythology.

These people long for the answer denied them by officialdom at the time of the assassination and ever since then. I read and hear it every day. The people are disillusioned with their media because of its failure to do as we have always expected it to do, report truthfully and honestly to us.

They long for an answer that cannot be given with definitiveness, without equivocation, the answer that was made impossible by that immediate official conspiracy to see to it that there could and would be no such answer as soon as it was known that Oswald had been killed and thus there would be no trial, nor working of the American system of justice.

This is what makes it necessary, in any effort to seek an answer, to employ the traditional lawyer's approach when there is limitation to circumstantial evidence, to motive, means and opportunity.

This is what makes it that or nothing.

In understanding of this and in assessment of it and its causes David Wise's The Politics of Lying can have great value. Along with his unintended confession of being part of this politics of lying that is the official way and while it has always been that, is ever so much more that since John Kennedy was assassinated.

All that should not have happened and did happen was made possible by this terrible curse of secrecy, the curse made more of a curse because of the media's acceptance of it and by the media's acceptance of the official lie of the official assassination mythology. The media did more than merely accept that. It has with virtually no deviation at all and with only a few minor deviations that changed nothing at all, continued to tell the people to believe the official assassination mythology. This means it continues to be to the people.

It is with regard to both official secrecy and official lying that Wise is so authoritative a source.

Secrecy meaning "national security" secrecy, is the secrecy of a buzzword, not a reality.

It means a violent, revolutionary change in our form of government, into an authoritarianism with the trappings but not the reality of a democracy. This has been the reality since John Kennedy was assassinated. It is the bastard of The Cold War and its mentality. It is what John Kennedy prevented, as detailed above, in what he could prevent of what the military intended. This prevented what could have been nuclear holocausts. It is what was intended in the unsuccessful prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking The Pentagon Papers and of the newspapers that published excerpts from them. Which caused no harm at all and which were later published more fully in books, again with no real harm resulting at all. It is also an official government intention that while largely kept secret was in part brought to light by Wise in the "Secrecy" part of his book, in his chapter titled, "Secrecy, National Security and the Press."

Writing of The Pentagon Papers case he quotes from an earlier secret CIA study for changing our laws that as Wise shows would have the effect of changing the form of our society, making it authoritarian, not democratic. Speaking of the difficulty the government has had because of the Constitution and democratic laws in jailing those who make public use of what was rubber-stamped as a "security" classified, Wise writes, quoting that formerly secret study:

"The problem is particularly acute in a democratic society whose laws and courts must provide broad protection to criminal defendants." If one detects a regretful note in that last sentence (he had quoted), a mild annoyance at those bothersome democratic legal protections, one would be right.

The study goes on to say: "The deterrence provided by the espionage laws and related statutes is weakened by the difficulty of prosecution under them. This is especially true in cases involving disaffected or careless employees of intelligence agencies; the defense usually include strong equitable pleas which may excite a sympathetic public response." That inconvenient public again.

Moreover, the CIA said, the espionage statutes, "as their name implies, were designed to punish espionage and not to punish simple unauthorized disclosure. Thus, these statutes require that there be an intent to harm the United States or to aid a foreign government. In practice, therefore, prosecutions are successful only where it can be proved that an individual has passed the information to a representative of a foreign government. An individual who simply reveals to the public at large classified data is for all practical purposes immune from prosecution since his defense, of course, would be that he thought the American public had a right to know and the government would not be able to prove intent to aid a foreign government or to harm the United States." Although written in 1966, the CIA interpretation amounted to an unwitting defense brief for Daniel Ellsberg.

The espionage laws provide a "startling lack of protection" for intelligence secrets, the CIA study continued. "no legislation has yet been enacted to cover the new problems arising out of the chronic 'cold war' status of international relations . . . "

Because of what is called this "serious gap" in the espionage laws, the CIA study proposed, in effect, an Official Secrets Act for intelligence information. This draft legislation would create the new category of Intelligence Data. Anything so stamped would be automatically accepted by the courts as secret. Prosecution would take place without any necessity that the government disclose the nature of the information. A jury would not have to decide whether it was properly classified; the government would not have to prove anything more than the fact that the material was stamped Intelligence Data.* (page 154)

At this point Wise has a footnote:

*The law would also increase the power of the director of Central Intelligence to seek court injunctions to prevent release or publication of intelligence information.

Here what I point out above should be recalled, some of the more preposterous CIA claims to urgent "national security" considerations of a nature that could lead to the rupture of foreign relations or even to war over such matters as the names of newspapers and of hotels if disclosed. Even what it had already disclosed. There is nothing within my not inconsiderable experiences with such outrageous CIA claims and its regular lying about them under oath and in courts that is too ridiculous or shameful for it.

And how about our Constitution, which is also its Constitution, that the CIA was proposing to nullify?

The study explained: "This would solve a vexatious and recurring problem for which there is no known cure in existing laws. That problem is the immunity enjoyed by an exposer of sensitive information when the information itself cannot for practical reasons be brought into the open for the purpose of prosecution." In short, the CIA would like to convict without proof.

The CIA document added: "It would be a step in the direction of 'crown privilege,' which is the basis of the British Official Secrets Acts." The CIA author was apparently unconcerned that the United States had, at considerable cost, disposed of the British crown and "crown privilege" some two hundred years ago.

Under existing law, the study said, to protect a secret, "the secret must be told." Not only is it undesirable to tell government secrets to a jury, the report continued, there is another great problem, "the capability of the jury to evaluate such data . . ."

With the candor of secrecy -- the CIA proposal was not, after all, meant to see the light of day -- the document noted that the proposed legislation in effect "would substitute the judgment of the director of Central Intelligence for that of a jury." That should take care of those vexatious laws, courts, public opinion, and incompetent juries.

Abandoning traditional democratic legal precepts, the CIA draft bill would reverse the usual requirement that the government prove that someone is guilty: "Instead of the government proving intent, the defendant would have the burden of showing that he had verified the legality of his action in imparting the [intelligence] data."

What the CIA was proposing here is a return to what our Revolutionary War was fought to end, that one was guilty until he proved his innocence. This is an authoritarian, not a democratic concept. It is the law of the police state.

Wise continued, nothing omitted in quotation:

The report claimed that the law would apply only to CIA employees or former employees, CIA contractors and their employees, and military men detailed to CIA: "It does not address itself to the question of leaks to the press." However, the draft law clearly requires that "Whoever possesses Intelligence Data" guard it from disclosure to unauthorized persons, language that would appear to apply equally as well to a news reporter as to any other unauthorized recipient.

In 1972, in the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the staff of a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas drafted a proposed revision of the federal criminal code that would have made any disclosure of "classified information" a felony. The language, which would have amounted to an Official Secrets Act, was omitted from the bill as introduced.

The British Official Secrets Act has always had an appeal to Americans of an authoritarian turn of mind. "We need a severe Official Secrets Act," Dean Acheson wrote when The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, "to prevent irresponsible or corrupt transfer of secret papers from the government to publishers. He also called for the establishment of a commission of the quality of the Royal Commission [on secrecy] recently re-created in Britain." (page 155)

This is the highly respected Acheson who as author of The Truman Doctrine formulated The Cold War, who was frustrated when we did not go to war with Cuba and the USSR when that dispute could be and was settled peacefully.

At the very time the CIA was cooking up its plan to bypass our legal system, violate the Constitution and eliminate the jury it was getting away with just such a scheme in federal district court in Baltimore.

In 1965, Eeirk Heine filed a slander suit against another Estonian emigre, Juri Raus, Civil Action 15952. Heine claimed, in the words of John Hanrahan's story in the Washington Post of June 7, 1976, that "the CIA, acting through Raus, was attempting to ruin his career as an anti-
Communist lecturer by spreading stories about him among Estonian emigres that he was a Soviet agent." (Emphasis added)

Heine, meaning the CIA, was represented by the highest-price of counsel, including Paul R. Connolly, who was the partner of the famed Edward Bennett Williams. The Williams spent years on the President's intelligence advisory board, ostensibly in oversight over the CIA.

Hanrahan's article reported a remand from the fourth circuit court of appeals "for another hearing on specific points dealing with whether the CIA had actually given instructions to Raus concerning Heine."

Federal district court "Chief Judge, Roszel C. Thomsen made it clear," Hanrahan wrote, that (CIA Director Richard) Helms could not be compelled to answer any question if the CIA director feels that to do so would jeopardize national security."

In his lectures Heine showed antiCommunist films. He says that he had been a guerrilla fighter before the Russians took Estonia over, or was an anti-Nazi fighter, and then served time in a Russian prison camp. From the available records the CIA did not in any way question this in court. I have five of its conclusory affidavits, four by Helms filed between December 30, 1965 and October 7, 1966. One was also filed by the CIA's general counsel Lawrence Houston. My recollection is that they were secret affidavits, the CIA having claimed that secrecy was required by "national security."

In Helms's April 1, 1966 affidavit he refers to Raus's "employment by the Agency." Raus was not a CIA employee in the normal sense. He was employed as an informer. The CIA refers to its agents as "employees," not its informers. In that very same affidavit Helms lets the cat out of the bag by referring to Raus as "a source" for the CIA about the Soviet Union in Estonia and on "Estonian emigre activities in foreign countries as well as in the United States."

Helms swore that Raus was "employed by the" CIA "from time to time," but actually he was only a "source."

In short, he was not actually "employed" by the CIA. He was paid as an informer, and that only.

While claiming that Raus was its informer, the CIA also admitted that not only was he a propagandist for it but that he had slandered Heine for it: "the defendant (Raus) was furnished information concerning the plaintiff (Heine) by the Central Intelligence Agency and was instructed to disseminate such information to members of the Legion (of Estonian Liberation) so as to protect the integrity of the Agency's foreign intelligence sources." Propaganda protects "intelligence sources"?

How slandering Heine could "protect foreign intelligence sources" Helms did not state and the judges accepted that. It is hokum that Helms knew would not be checked so he included it to get around the prohibition against domestic activities in the CIA's charter.

Translating another part of this Helms secret affidavit into plain English, the CIA gave Raus the slanderous material about Heine and paid him to distribute it.

So certain were Helms and the CIA that he and it could get away with almost anything in the federal courts his first affidavit, supposedly all needed, was of but three short paragraphs of 10 lines of typing!

Neither Helms nor his general counsel even suggested that Heine was not slandered.

They just misrepresented the fact not to have to pay him for it, there being little question but that its intent was to damage him within the emigres who from that part of Europe in particular were divided along political lines, some anti-Soviets having been pro-Nazi. The CIA preferred Raus' faction of the anti-Communist Estonians so it set out to defame and ruin the effectiveness of Heine by telling Raus to call him "a Soviet agent." They only wonder is that it did not get him killed.

This is a fair sample what could be expected if the CIA's plan to bypass our legal system and have the courts compelled to take any CIA director's unquestioned word about anything he said. Without even a jury to consider it.

This is the same Helms who when found to be a perjurer by the courts was defended by Connolly's senior partner, Edward Bennett Williams, as a true patriot.

To and in the CIA the felony perjury is the hallmark of patriots.

Or, had the CIA gotten away with what it planned the courts would without question have to accept the word of perjurers, of official felons.

The Helms Heine affidavits may not be technical perjury but they were designed to serve that purpose and they did falsely misrepresent Raus to be a regular CIA employee.

The Supreme Court, by the way, upheld Helms' affidavits and the decision of Judge Thomsen that Helms could not be questioned about them on the ground that "there are certain public interests that are paramount"!

Our Constitution apparently ceased being one of those "public interests that are paramount."

This is how the CIA was able to frustrate our system of justice without the 1966 plan it cooked up to make that a matter of law.

As Wise said of this CIA plan of 1966, "the CIA would like to convict without proof." It "would also substitute the judgement of the director for that of a jury." As it succeeded in doing to the poor Heine whose character it assassinated and whose anti-Communist effectiveness it eliminated.

King George and his generals like Cornwallis, Burgonne and Howe would have been proud. But I think not George Washington, or James Madison, or Thomas Jefferson or Sam Adams and those others who, as they thought and intended, had made what the CIA proposed an impossibility in the country and the nation they established so that we could live in freedom without such authoritarian and, in recent, such fascist and nazi practices and "laws".

What the CIA was proposing, what authoritarianism is, what military control really means however it may be glossed over or described, is the most radical change in our basic concepts, in our freedoms of which we boast and that we take pride in, and the most basic of changes in our Constitution, changes not made as all are required to be made by our controlling Constitution. It was also, as Wise points out, not limited to agency employees despite the language intended to lend to the belief it was. It would have applied to any person.

When the CIA is capable of this authoritarianism is there anything of which it is not capable, would not do to bring authoritariansim about?

And when this most basic end to what traditional American belief and practice once begins, where does it end? Where can it end?

It means, as Wise points out with regard to the British Official Secrets Act, a return to what our forefathers fought against and defeated to establish ours as an independent country with own concepts of freedom and what is right and wrong; of what government may not do to individuals to deny them any rights, not alone the right of freedom of speech. This CIA proposal itself would be the beginning of the end of the right to trial by jury. It bypassed the jury by rendering it meaningless.

Earlier in this chapter Wise has an excellent but limited commentary on the indispensability of a free press if there is to be a democratic society. What he does not point out is that this free press enables it to inform the people so that they can make their wishes and beliefs known. He also does not point out that it is only when there is full and free discussion can most mistakes be corrected before they do great harm, that government can be prevented from doing wrong:

At the core of all this is the continuing clash between the values of a free press and those of national security. Many constitutional scholars, political leaders, jurists, and other believe those values must be "balanced" and compromised. But a democratic system requires a public informed about the decisions and actions of its political leaders. If democracy is to work, the freedom of the press to report about the activities of government cannot be qualified by prior restraint or subsequent punishment. The press must be free to publish no matter what the potential harm to an officially defined "national security." The risks of repression are greater. Any legal restrictions imposed upon the press in advance, or by later punishment, that limit what it can report about the government would diminish the First Amendment and change the nature of American democracy. It is always possible to rationalize the case for curbing the press in particular circumstances. But who can say, once it begins, where it will end? Freedom to publish about government is either absolute, or it does not exist. Once qualified, it may be described as something else, but not as freedom of the press.

And if there is no freedom to publish there is no democracy.

It means the people do not have the right to know what their government does or plans to do. Or protest it or complain about it. Like start a "preventive war" in secret when that is prohibited absolutely by our Constitution. Or have that military "new look," that SIOP-62, which also was the most basic violation of our Constitution, would have wiped a major part of the world out and poisoned all the rest of it if the nuclear holocaust it would have been. Or, with it all in secret, would still have meant a nuclear war if Kennedy has not blocked the military intent to invade Cuba during that 1962 missile crisis. But as we have seen, the military believes that the people do not have this right to know in this military concept of what a free and democratic society means.

Wise begins the part of his book he titles "Secrecy" with a quotation of General Maxwell D. Taylor, the general in whom Kennedy placed his trust as he struggled with the Vietnam problem he had inherited. Taylor was interviewed on the CBS morning news on June 17, 1971. He was asked, "Well, what do you make, General, of the principle of the people's right to know . . .? " Taylor's forthright response was:

"I don't believe in that as a general principle."

There can be no more forthright military statement that it does not believe in our Constitution, in our most basic principles.

At the very beginning of his important book Wise states a painful but obvious truth that has become more painfully obvious since then:

. . . large numbers of people no longer believe the government or the President. They no longer believe the government because they have come to understand that the government does not always tell the truth.

This erosion of confidence between people and government is perhaps the single most significant political development in American in the past decade. Because of it, an American President today operates within a new political framework. He can no longer assume that a majority of the people will believe him. (page 14)

In the context of this book that "most important political development in America in the past decade" is in fact "the most important political development" since President Kennedy was assassinated.

The Pentagon Papers and the government's lying about them and that war and the secrecy that made all of that possible is what Wise uses to carry this idea forward:

The disclosures of the Pentagon Papers did demonstrate, however, how easy it is for government officials to use the security classification system to keep from public view policies, decisions, and actions that are precisely the opposite of what the public is told. In other words, through official secrecy, we now have a system of institutionalized lying.

Policy makers who consider it desirable to mask their decisions or their objectives, or who wish to mislead the public or withhold information, can do so as easily as reaching for the nearest rubber stamp. In short, lying and secrecy are two sides of the same coin.

The government can lie, withhold information, or classify it. But equally important is what the government does choose to communicate. And the Executive Branch has at its disposal today a large and powerful government public relations and information machine. It uses this machine to sell those policies and distribute those official truths that it wishes the public to receive. (Pages 15-16)

"Official truths" is a polite way of saying official lies.

As we have seen, the grim reality is that it was more than the people who were lied to by the government. Those "policy makers" or those who at least in theory make policy were also lied to by the military. That is its way of making policy, of making policy decisions that cannot be changed and were so utterly disastrous in Vietnam.

There is another side to this "official truth" coin to which we soon return.

Wise concludes his first chapter with a statement of the importance of a free press if there is to be a free and democratic society, one that works as it is supposed to work. He then says correctly that it is "the politics of lying" that has brought these basic changes about:

The American press is often called "the Fourth Branch of government," a term that at once reflects its quintessential importance and a major weakness. For the press is not a branch of government, and to the extent that singly, or collectively, its members forget this fact, or confuse themselves with the government, the public is not served.

The press can indeed validly be criticized, not for analyzing the actions and decisions of government too much -- which was the theme of [Nixon's Vice President and hatchetman on the press Spiro] Agnew's laments -- but for analyzing too little. The press's failure to question government information more vigorously, the willingness to accept official "handouts" as fact, the tendency toward passive report -- what Tom Wicker has called "the press box mentality" -- has made it that much easier for government to mislead the public.

The American system is based not only upon formal checks and balances among the three branches of government, it depends also, and perhaps more importantly, on a delicate balance of confidence between the people and the government. That balance of trust has been altered.

By 1972 the politics of lying had changed the politics of America. In place of trust, there was widespread mistrust; in place of confidence, there was disbelief and doubt in the system and its leaders.

The consent of the governed is basic to American democracy. If the governed are misled, if they are not told the truth, or if through official secrecy and deception they lack information on which to base intelligent decisions, the system may go on -- but not as a democracy. After nearly two hundred years, this may be the price America pays for the politics of lying. (page 18)

This is well put. It is a basic truth. But as Wise, a member of it, does not say of this "Fourth Branch of government," the media, is that it also lies and the effect of its lies is like the very detrimental effect of the lying of the other three branches.

The phrase Wise coined and uses as the title of his book is as apt as could be. That has become the way in which governments govern and make policy.

Tom Wicker, who had been The New York Times's Washington bureau chief before becoming an associate editor and one of its columnists, thereafter retiring to a Vermont farm, also has an apt description of the press that blindly accepts government handouts and reports them without questioning. Yet, and this gets to one of the greatest of all the dangers our system and its freedoms face from this "policy of lying" and from this "press box mentality" of which both were, tragically, a part. This relates to "the policy of lying" about the JFK assassination and the media's blind and unquestioning acceptance of that official mythology, which is as big a lie as our government ever told. Acceptance of this "politics of lying" and of the media's "press box mentality" involved both Wise and Wicker, when that lie of the Warren Report was first told and three decades later.

Not aware of what he was to do two decades later, Wise reports that President Johnson, who he here does not say was more than merely pleased with the Warren Report, did not believe it.

CBS-TV and the retired President had contracted three prime time specials:

What the viewers could not see on their television screens, moreover, was the Johnson had access to scores of other classified documents as he spoke to Cronkite. During the interview Walt Rostow and Tom Johnson, a bright young former newsman from Macon, Georgia, who had served the President in the White House as assistant press secretary, sat just out of camera range with armloads of files. As Cronkite would turn to a new subject in the interview, Rostow and Tom Johnson would pull out the relevant documents and hand them to the former President.

Although Johnson thus felt free to use classified documents for his own purpose both in his memoirs and on television, he nevertheless reserved the right to edit the CBS interviews for "national security" reasons. All three interviews were filmed at the LBJ ranch in Texas in September and October, 1969. After each filming Johnson was handed an audio tape cassette of the interview; he then had twenty-four to forty-eight hours to make any deletions for security.

When the third Johnson interview was shown on May 2, 1970, it included this message about thirty seconds into the program: "Certain material has been deleted from this broadcast at President Johnson's request, made on the ground of national security." During the filming of the interview Johnson had expressed some misgivings about the Warren Commission's central finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had killed President Kennedy. Johnson indicated to Cronkite that he still retained some doubts and that, possibly, a conspiracy had been involved.

Later Johnson apparently thought the better of these remarks, but he did not ask to delete them until several weeks had gone by. Cronkite, backed by Richard S. Salant, president of CBS News, opposed the deletion, arguing that the request had come too late. But they were overruled, possibly by CBS president Frank Stanton.

Cronkite, a newsman of great integrity and high professional standards, had been unhappy from the start with Johnson's right to edit the tapes. In this case he felt that Johnson was misusing his right to make deletions, since it was difficult to see how, six years after the assassination, any "national security" was involved.

As the CBS interviews suggested, Presidents or former Presidents can freely ignore the secrecy label when it suits their purposes, or invoke it to suppress embarrassing information. The system exists not so much to protect national security as to provide a flexible tool of power for political leaders. (pages 96-7)

Cronkite found it only "difficult to see how" the former President's beliefs about the assassination that made him President involved any "national security." That is not only "difficult to see" it is impossible. But CBS accepted this impossible justification for an improper demand that really involved the non-functioning, malfunctioning and misfunctioning of Johnson's administration and the legitimacy of his succession to the presidency.

When none of this was classified or even classifiable there could not have been any legitimate "national security" element in what the people had every right to know and CBS agreed to keep them from knowing and for all of his great integrity and high professional standards, Cronkite accepted it as he accepted his paycheck for it, in public silence.

Although Wise here does not point it out to his readers, later in his book (pages 144-5) as we have seen he reports that for ever so much less than the former President was doing the CIA prepared a plan under which others of lesser or little or no importance would be jailed and that with the Constitutional protection of the jury eliminated for them.

As Eisenhower had done with Donovan for his Eisenhower book, had wheelbarrows and dollie loads of classified papers trucked to him for his use, Johnson also did that, aided by the prime hawk of his administration, Walt Rostow. When Eisenhower and Johnson and others used "intelligence information" freely for their personal reason, to improve their images -- publicity -- and for personal profit, a reporter, even one who innocently picked a piece of paper up and gave it to a reporter or another who made any use of it, would face jail.

The real question is hardly one of any legitimate or rational concept of "national security" and it rarely is.

But even without all the meaning it has attributed to it, this kind of information is almost never accessible to most Americans. The major media does not report it, as CBS News did not report Johnson's open and wholesale use of classified "national security" information on its show.

"Unhappy" as Cronkite was and great as were his "integrity" and "high professional standards," he did not give this information about Johnson's public use of classified records to his audience.

Actually, a staffer on those TV specials leaked a copy of what was excised to a friend of mine and he gave it to The Washington Post.

But neither the Post nor Wise, who diminished what Johnson said and believed into "some misgivings", explained that what Johnson was actually saying is that he did not believe the conclusions of the Commission he had selected with such care to reach the conclusions it did not "reach" but began its work with them already "reached."

Putting this another way, Johnson did not believe the Report official investigation of the crime that made him President, the assassination of President Kennedy.

While Johnson did not advertise it he made his refusal to believe his own Commission's Report clear to others before it was printed and to his White House staff. He actually asked the FBI for more information confirming his refusal to believe that Report and his belief that there had been a conspiracy. This has been in the public domain since the FBI disclosed it under FOIA pressures in December 1977 or January 1978. I have given copies of the FBI memo I quote to many reporters of all media but I do not recall any of them ever using it.

On April 4, 1967, immediately after columnist Jack Anderson saw the FBI's chief of leaking, lobbying and propaganda, Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach, who headed the division whose official title was "Crime Records" while he and it did this kind of work, DeLoach wrote a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. But because nobody inside the FBI ever addressed Hoover either directly or by name, his memo was to Hoover's next in command and closest friend, Clyde Tolson. In it he recalled a phone call to him late the night before. It was from Marvin Watson, President Johnson's long-time top assistant. In that conversation, in DeLoach's words, Watson "stated that the President had told him, in an off moment, that he now was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt that the CIA had something to do with this plot. Watson requested any further information we could furnish in this connection would be much appreciated by him and by the President." (FBIHQ 62-109060-5075)

In a lengthy manuscript titled "Senator Russell Dissents" not published as I write this I go into what follows in considerably more detail than in Whitewash IV, where I broke that news. It includes the fact that Senator Russell had refused to believe the basis of the Report, that single- bullet theory, and that Commissioner member Senator John Sherman Cooper also was and remained adamant in his refusal to agree to that theory. In that article as in less length I earlier reported this and the fact that it had been arranged so that Russell's refusal to agree to this theory was not recorded, he had forced an executive session to record his disagreement only for the Commission's general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, to see to it that the Russell record of disagreement did not exist in any Commission record. When I put the proof of how he had been tricked in Russell's hands he broke his long relationship with Johnson and encouraged my work until his dying day.

That executive session was on Friday, September 18, 1964. After it ended, without the stenographic transcript the Commission had agreed would be made of all of them, by phone Russell reported it to Johnson. When in response to the 1992 law requiring fullest possible disclosure of all JFK assassination records on April 15, 1994, some of Lyndon Johnson's taping of his conversations were disclosed. When Russell told Johnson of his disagreement with this most basic of the Commission's conclusions it was because he believed that his disagreement would be noted in the Report. In the Associated Press story on these tapes Johnson is quoted as telling Russell, "I don't either" believe that theory.

The meaning of this is not in that AP story nor was it given to the people by any of the media of which I have any knowledge.

The meaning, of course, is that the President himself did not believe the official assassination mythology he had personally endorsed when it was released. He believed it was impossible.

If two Commission members and the President of the United States did not believe the Warren Report, who should?

But the major media continued its support of the lie told the people by their government about how and by whom their President had been assassinated.

Even though the President of the United States himself believed that terrible crime remained unsolved.

In Wise's book although he did give an understated account of Johnson's belief that the crime is unsolved, as in an oversimplification his refusal to believe that single-bullet theory means, in his excellent study of "The Politics of Lying" what is undoubtedly the biggest official lie and a political lie is the lie about the assassination of President Kennedy. Wise does include it in his book, Random House does not include it in the index it had prepared for his book. That index does include some subjects. It is not strictly a name index. But Wise's account of Johnson's disbelief is not indexed under Johnson or Kennedy and there is no "assassination" item in that index.

So there is this "press box mentality" of which Wicker spoke in reporting on the assassination, as there is on the editorial and oped pages and in book publishing.

What Wicker himself has done reflects what he condemned.

He wrote a foreword for a commercial publication on the report of the House assassins committee. It concluded that there had been a conspiracy. Undaunted when a publisher who might publish a book for him asked for a pre-publication blurb for the most designedly, deliberately, extensively and inclusively dishonest book in support of the official assassination mythology, this is what the prestigious Wicker of that "press box mentality" wrote and Random House used on the back cover:

Case Closed is a deliberate, detailed, thoroughly documented, sometimes brutal, always conclusive destruction of one Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory after another. Posner shows them to be in some cases impossible, in others mistaken, in many dishonest, in all wishful. Yet the book's most important contribution may be Posner's thorough, dispassionate, yet rather sympathetic account of the warped and miserable life of Lee Harvey Oswald. After his book, the case of JFK is indeed closed. Case Closed is important.

There is no way Wicker could know what can justify these statements.

There is not a single qualification in any of his praises for Posner's work, which Wicker quite obviously did not check and really could not on his Vermont farm.

It is, in Wise's words reflecting Walter Cronkite's strong disapproval of LBJ's censorship to which he agreed, "difficult to see how" Wicker could endorse the House assassins' conclusion that there had been an assassination conspiracy and write has he did for Random House and Posner the exact opposite.

Earlier he had plugged another angled and dishonest book that for the sources it misuses the author limits to what the Commission published. Wicker and Dan Schorr did that in 1983 for Jean Davison's Oswald's Games. It is not easy to be as dishonest as she is in her omissions from and misuses of what the Commission published only, as I told her when we were both on a radio talk show together.

Before my Case Open appeared and asking nothing of him I wrote Wicker because I was and am concerned about precisely what Wise reports and exposes in his The Politics of Lying and that so many, including reporters who should know better, made themselves part of it. He sent me this postcard on February 3, 1994:

Dear Mr. Weisberg:

I said what I said about Case Closed because I thought it was true, and I still do. I gave the comment when asked for it by the publisher, who sent me the ms. I tell you that because I have nothing to hide, though I don't think you have any right to ask. In general, I'm sorry you feel as you do but I stand by what I said about Case Closed.

Sincerely . . . . Tom Wicker

P.S. I don't care what you may say about me in some future work. I long ago got use to criticism, and worse.

I can only wonder what Wicker's reaction would have been in his reporting days if someone had responded to him and his questioning about a very public and controversial matter, "I don't think you have a right to ask."

For the politics of lying there are different ways in which the lies are told. What we are told can be entirely false. It can be partly false. It can be false by misleading incompleteness in which some of what we are told is technically accurate but is false when what we are not told is understood. Among the other ways in which lies can be told is by not giving the correct meaning to what is told, as with Wise's own politics of lying in recounting Johnson's not believing his own official solution to the assassination of President Kennedy without telling his reader that it has this meaning. Yet this non-solution to that "crime of the century" is the biggest government lie of Wise's life and that of all of us. That it is palmed off on all of us as the solution is not within his cataloguing of official lies. Not being there he cannot assign its politics to it.

Nor does he have any mention of what was public knowledge, the military involvement in it and its lying, extensive lying of assorted varieties.

In these senses, in an otherwise excellent and important book he himself practices "The Politics of Lying" as Wicker displayed his "press box mentality."

I regret it for both of them and for all of us.

Chapter 14. Killing the Truth

What can I say as the end of a book like this?

That all the institutions of our society failed. Each and every one of them.

Beginning with the government, all branches of the government, executive most of all, the legislative and the judiciary.

With the failure of all our institutions all the protections of our society, of our system of government was made to fail and of our freedom was jeopardized.

Of the non-governmental institutions, the media failed miserably, disgracefully, sycophantically. All elements of the media. Including book publishers.

Our professors, our professional scholars, those who teach and inform the rest of us failed.

Potentially by far the most dangerous of those who failed themselves, the people and our democratical system is the military and its complex partners. Whether it was no more than failure is the question this book raises for the first time.

Those of us known collectively as "critics" also failed, as I document in my unpublished large manuscript, Inside the JFK Assassination Industry. In it I include myself as having failed.

The thrust of all my work, while not spelled out in my earlier books, is that in the time of great crisis, the time of the JFK assassination, all our institutions failed then and ever since then. All our institutions that were criticized ignored the criticism and persisted in failing, in refusing to meet their responsibilities to themselves and to the rest of us.

No further documentation or itemization of the failures of the executive branch under all administrations, particularly Johnsons, than is in my published books, is needed.

The Congress failed in allowing itself to be conned out of investigating by Johnson. One of the reason for his haste in appointing his Commission was to coopt the Congress.

After the Report was out the Congress insisted on continuing to fail. As an example of this I took a copy of Whitewash to the office of one of the Senators who had the earned reputation of being one of the toughest of mind, Wayne Morse of Oregon. His legislative assistant whose name I remember was Rock, was impressed by the book and what it mustered of the official evidence only and how it was put together. But when she tried to get the busy Morse to read it he told her, in approximately these words, "If Bobby (Kennedy) accepts it I have to accept it." Morse assumed that Bobby had accepted it. He had not. Until long after that Bobby said not a word about it and in fact, as I show with official documents in Post Mortem, the chapter "Hades not Camelot," he had refused to endorse that Report when pressured to do so.

When the House of Representatives established a committee to investigate the JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations in 1976 it began with the determination to fail. It began with the assumptions, which guaranteed failures, that the official mythologies in both crimes were essentially correct. Instead of actually investigating those crimes it undertook to refute the criticisms of the official JFK assassination mythology and got suckered into accepting assassination mythology spoon-fed to it by the FBI.

Each JFK hearing began with a narration of what it would deal with and in each narration it was explicit in what the quoted critics said that it would address. This was the design not of the committee members but of their general counsel and staff director, G. Robert Blakey. Blakey then devoted each hearing to refuting what he said those named critics said. Obvious as this was, gross a violation of the committee's mandate that it was, it escaped political or journalistic criticism. The media was not disappointed by that approach. (There is one critic whose name he never mentioned and whose writing he raised no questions about -- me.)

Blakey, formerly a lawyer in the Department of Justice organized-crime task force, began with the hangup that the mafia had assassinated the President. He was not able to create even a rational suspicion of that. So, after his big-league failure he coauthored a book making that claim. His committee editor, Richard Billings, was his coauthor.

Blakey did wind his King work up with a preposterous and entirely unproven irrational assumption that the accused assassin's, James Earl Ray's brothers John and Jerry were involved in a conspiracy with a safely-dead wealthy Missouri racist.

In the cock-and-bull nonsense made up by a criminal who then sought and through his helpfulness did get special consideration for another crime for which he faced trial, James Earl Ray got $50,000.00 to kill King. In fact Ray had so little money he had to risk robbing a whorehouse to be able to pay for an airplane ticket out of Canada and it he had had $100 more than was left when he got to Portugal he would have had enough to pay for boat fare to what was then known as Rhodesia. Rhodesia did not have an extradition treaty with the United States and Ray could not have been extradited. Moreover, it then also was the most racist of the racist African states. Its government would not have wanted to extradite Ray anyway.

I was James Earl Ray's investigator for the habeas corpus proceeding that was to determine whether he'd have the trial he never had. With the success of that procedure, I conducted the investigations for the two weeks of unsuccessful evidentiary hearings. They ended with a something less than Solomonic decision, that guilt or innocence were immaterial to whether Ray would get that trial. Thereafter I spent a decade in suing the Department of Justice for its records relevant to that case. All those records were readily available to Blakey. I'd already forced them into the public domain. In addition, he had the power of subpoena and could have gotten any records he wanted that way. But with that legal eagle (who after his committee record became a professor of law at Notre Dame University) was like the critics he criticized, without interest in any real investigation or with the fact developed by other investigations. Who needs fact when one is a genius and has the true genius' preconceptions? Knowing full well just how exceptional a genius he is Blakey did not speak to me or ask me what records I had he could use or if I had any leads for him to follow -- he did not even ask for the transcripts of those two weeks of evidentiary hearings in which the evidence I developed and the witnesses I located testified. That evidence was tested in the American way, under oath and subject to cross examination. But it proved Ray innocent, the reason for that quoted language from the judge's decision. Therefore Blakey had no interest in it.

Can there be higher qualifications for teaching the law than a manifested contempt for evidence and preference for preconception and indulging prejudice?

There was no other Congressional investigation of either crime. Earlier the Church committee established a JFK assassination subcommittee. Pennsylvania Republican Senator Richard Schweiker, later Ronald Reagan's first running-mate, was its chairman. Colorado Democratic Senator Gary Hart was the subcommittee's only other member. He had nothing to do with what Schweiker did or reported. He did nothing at all on that subcommittee. Schweiker began like Blakey later did, but from the other side. He was hungup on the nuttier conspiracy theories and his utterly worthless report dealt with nothing else.

So the Senate failed, too. Schweiker, who acted in the name of the Senate, saw to that, as Blakey did for the House.

The failures of the Congress contribute to the fact that the JFK assassination is an unsolved crime, to all that has cost the country, and to the widespread disenchantment over it.

By their failures the courts in the early days of the FOIA law and thereafter became and within my experience remained an adjunct of the de facto government conspiracy to withhold -- which means to keep secret -- official records that contradict and in many instances disapprove the official "solution" to the assassinations.

While what lawyers do is not usually referred to as a conspiracy, it was that and it had that effect in those many lawsuits. Under the conspiracy is law a combination to do what the law says is wrong and then take a step in pursuance of that agreement to do wrong. (Otherwise it is only free speech.) This is what they did, over and over again, each and every one of them who defended the government in those lawsuits I filed and in all the many cases of which I have knowledge and court records. Those government lawyers combined with those who swore falsely to what is material and thus in effect conspired with them to violate the law. In effect, too, they suborned perjury, a felony for other than a lawyer! This was their means of keeping secret what the law said could not be kept secret. That is largely how they denied those of us who write, so that the people can know what they need to know, the information to take to the people.

The media compounded its failure by never once reporting any of this.

Government agents were accused of felonies in open court and the accusations were proven and not once in the many times I did just that was it ever reported. Those agents thus were immune in their felonies and they repeated them, some being promoted for it!

Once I proved in court that the FBI agent used to swear falsely in that lawsuit was an unindicted co-conspirator in a major case of that day, the case in which the acting director of the FBI and his top assistants were to be tried for serious offenses, an unprecedented case. He swore falsely to enable the government to keep secret records that under the law said it could not keep secret. And they got away with it. He sat mute in that court when I presented this information to that judge. She was offended that the government used an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case as an affiant before her. This was because he was in a compromised position and it compromised her. He was in a position in which, because he was an unindicted co-conspirator, he had to do what the government wanted him to do, otherwise he could be added to the indictment and be an indicted conspirator. He also would have lost his retirement which would be his in two years. That was in Civil Action 75-1996. That agent, having done his duty as the FBI saw his duty, was reassigned to a field office near his home and worked for the FBI there until he retired.

But that judge said not a word about his perjury, although she was the only judge before whom I was in those many cases who ever did a thing about all the government misconduct that tainted all those cases. She banished that agent from her court. But she did not even expunge his proven false swearing from the court record. His false swearing, his part in that de facto conspiracy, succeeded in keeping assassination information secret.

And although that agent was an unindicted co-conspirator in that sensational case of that time, not a word of any of this appeared in the papers or was mentioned by the electronic media or in any magazine.

While I did not do it to get personal attention and did nothing to attract media interest in it, what I did try to prevent these felonies was unusual, the man-bites-dog king of thing that the media usually loves. Instead of having my lawyer merely make allegations in pleadings, I proved those official perjuries in documented sworn affidavits. I was also always in court to be asked to testify and to be cross-examined about what I attested to. With the prosecutor also the government's lawyer in these cases I was in effect putting my head on the block and challenging the government to charge me with perjury. In each of those affidavits I created a situation in which the court was confronted with sworn statements one of which was a felony before that court. Except for being threatened by a surprised judge one time, the threat against my lawyer and me that did not work, nothing ever happened and there was never any mention of any of this unusual thing outside of those court rooms.

That the government was capable of such serious misconduct before the federal courts and that the timid courts tolerated it, in particular with regard to withholding assassination information, was not news to media is but one of its many and unended failures.

They began when it without any serious question behaved like the media in authoritarian societies. All the media not only praised the Report when it was issued while not checking it out, it then went out of its way to ignore the serious published criticism of the Report and to demean those books and those of us who wrote them.

Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, was the first book on that subject. The assassination of any President is, without question, at the very least, one of the major events in any lifetime. Yet that first book on it, a book tested by time and still used in colleges and universities, was not reviewed by a single newspaper or review service.

But those books that kissed official ass were praised to the heavens by those same papers and all elements of the media. The most shameful example of this is the glorification of the most deliberately dishonest of the books of that stench, Gerald Posner's knowing and deliberately mistitled Case Closed. No book on the subject was ever given the exalting and extensive attention he and his book got from all the media, here and abroad. Without once, by any reporter, reviewer, oped article writer, radio or TV producer, talk show staff or producer -- not by a single one of those innumerable sycophants, those who protected errant officialdom -- ever being checked out. It is so brazenly dishonest, so vulnerable to the simplest checking of any part of it, that Posner, a Judenrat to me, and his publisher, Random House, have to have assumed this unquestioning media acceptance. Random House shunned the traditional peer review of non- fiction books. It had to know that Posner's and its commercialization and exploitation of that great tragedy could not survive any competent peer review.

When my Case Open appeared not a single paper reported or reviewed it. No single reporter or reviewer phoned to ask me a single question about it or about Posner's shameless dishonesty. Nor did any one from any of the electronic media.

It is not an everyday affair when in a field of serious writing one author refers to another who boasts of being a "Wall Street lawyer" as a shyster, a literary thief, a literary whore and as a writer who cannot tell the truth even by accident. If only one of these characterizations is false there is indefensible libel.

Not one of those many of shameful silence asked me if I had heard a word of complaint or protest from Posner or from Random House or from any lawyer representing them. (I have not.) Particularly not those in the business of reviewing books, those who make their livings from book reviewing. The accusations in Case Open, by normal standards, are major news in that field. It also is major news if they are undenied accusations, particularly after the unprecedented and glorifying attention to it and to Posner.

But then those of that species of literary whoring make their livings from the advertising of those who publish books, along with enjoying favors from them.

Then, too, how would those who treated Posner's outrageous dishonesty as virtually holy script look if they said a word about a book that showed them to be uncritical propagandists, rather than serious book critics? This is also true of all the reporters who raved about Posner and his book, without a single one doing what reporters are supposed to do, check it out. Not one asked anything of me when it appeared, or later when my exposure of it appeared. Nor did any of those many TV producers who fought to get Posner on the tube.

So of course if they acknowledged and reported on or reviewed Case Open they would be condemning themselves -- all of the media, all elements of it.

This abdication and worse extended into even the most minor of the media, the JFK assassination newsletters that exist only to excite their few readers with fanciful fictions. To refer to most of them by the accepted word, as "theories", praises them.

As an example of this, Dr. Jerry Rose's The Fourth Decade, published by that State University of New York professor at Fredonia, delayed any review of Case Open until the end of the usual shelf-life of most books in the chains that sell by far most of the books in this country. In his September, 1994 issue he had an impartial review by Ohio history teacher David Keck and what is called "A Critical Review" by an afficiando of nutty conspiracy theories, Tom DeVries, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The latter is twice longer than the former. Aside from DeVries' constitutional inability to understand what he does not want to understand, his life in the field in which he pretends serious scholarship and writes as an unquestionable authority (don't all those many nuts?) coming from its myriad fantasies, he spends part of his self-promotion guised as a review in defending others conspiracy-theory nuts from my earlier criticisms of them. DeVries endorses many by name.

When this arrant fool pretends to deal with fact, and he could not recognize a fact if it knocked his eyes out, he condemns me for not including the utterly irrelevant, the names of those who excited all the would-be Perry Masons who gave them the name of "The Dealey Plaza Tramps." Not that DeVries or any others of the assassinations lunatic fringe have ever shown any relevance. There was not at all, none of any kind. And that long after their names had been disclosed by the Dallas police whose records and those of the FBI leave it without any question that those men had and could have had no connection of any kind with the assassination.

As an example of the irresponsibility and method of those dream-world disinformationists DeVries writes, "I phoned a friend and fellow JFK assassination researcher (sic) who has maintained a friendly correspondence with Harold Weisberg for years." Here DeVries has an end note that reads "This researcher asked not to be named." Resuming quotation, nothing omitted, "He had recently spoken with him and told me 'You're half right;" referring to DeVries own genius in saying that my book had been dictated. "It was half written and half dictated."

None of that or of any of my other books was dictated. I never had any conversation with any one about anything like that. Never having done it there would have been no purpose in any such conversation. No wonder DeVries's "friend" who claims to be my friend insisted on anonymity!

I use this of all the many illustrations of how those who call themselves critics deceive and mislead the people and create diversions that never end and proliferate even more of those insanities and irrelevancies for two reasons in particular. One is that it is the most recent of the many inventions and unjustified imaginings that serve to confuse and mislead all those who read them even more than the confusion with which most of them begin.

Another, and this is so irrational it can hardly be believed, but it is true and unretracted or apologized for. It happened when this same publication sponsored a conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993. For it one of its co-chairman, who is one of its more prominent college- educated subject-matter ignoramuses, and is also a college professor, solicited a paper on me as a government agent!

If that self-important stupidity George Michael Evica, who insists on being referred to as George Michael, not as George only, had even attained a kindergarten equivalency knowledge of the subject matter, he would have known that I filed more than a dozen FOIA lawsuits against the government; that some of them established precedents the government opposed; that one led to what the government very strongly opposed, the amending of the investigatory-files exemption to make CIA, FBI and similar agency records accessible under FOIA; that former Warren Commission member then President Gerald Ford vetoed it; that the Congress passed it over his veto; that I pried loose from secrecy and made available to others about a third of a million pages that had been withheld by the government; that after seven published books, including the first on that subject, I received not a single complaint of unfairness or inaccuracy and so much more that is the exact opposite of what the government wanted, and he can regard me as some kind of government agent, his abysmal ignorance is world-class in a field for which that distinction is not easily earned. For all his PhD.

In the assassination nuthouse of which Evica is a charter member, anyone not addicted to nuttiness is ipso facto suspect. Or worse, an agent.

The Evicas, the Roses and the others of that species of political infantilism and the playing of childrens' games with this crime that turned the world around, do not reach many Americans, but those they do reach seek information about that crime and its consequences and for the most part they all, in varying degrees, not all world-class Evica, confuse the people even more and become adjuncts of errant officialdom. If they were government agents they could not better serve the government that lied about the assassinations any more effectively than they do with their mythologies, fantasies, hatreds and attacks on the peoples' only source of assassination fact.

So on all sides, from the major and the most minor of those who take supposed information to the people, the people are deceived, misled, misinformed, lied to, encouraged to credit fantasies and to have faith in those who range from crazy to gross exploiters of the assassination.

The people have no ready source of dependable information about the assassinations and their investigations; and save for their overwhelming disbelief in the official mythology, a belief that is a credit to the good common sense of most Americans, they would be even more confused than they are.

I have given this school-boy mixture of indulged self-importance, stupidity, fantasy and gross ignorance of the established assassination fact this attention because the people, including those who read and trust those so-called newsletters, are not aware of being deceived and misled by them.

They are, however, insignificant in their corrupting effect and influence when compared with the major media offenders. From both extremes, from these minor publications to all of the major media, the people of the country almost never have access to truth and to fact of the assassinations and their investigations. It is popular awareness of this that is one of the major causes of widespread distrust in the media, deserved mistrust.

I refer above to the failure of the virtually all in academe, to the eminences of the academic world. This has two main parts. Each part is indispensable to the major media and its determined failure.

One part is by ignoring the subject, great as its significance is, has been and will be in our lives and that of the country and its democratic system. When the professors do not ignore the subject, as with few conspicuous exceptions they do, they endorse the corruption of the truth and fact about it by our government. They also write the texts that, true to Orwell, are used in teaching, from the youngest to the graduate schools, that the mythology is the actuality, the truth about the assassination.

Many children have written me protesting what they read in their texts and are told by their teachers. (Perhaps some of the teachers believe this is a requirement of holding their jobs or earning promotions.) These kids have enough sense to see through the propaganda they are required to believe is our history. These children also want the truth, what they can believe. Like that boy of only ten who concluded his letter to me saying, referring to John Kennedy, "He left us something."

This is the field of the history professors and what have they done, those that do not keep their tails between their legs and their minds tightly closed.

Their practice of Orwell to satisfy Big Brother, to and including the doctoral level, is confirmed by several doctoral theses I have.

It is confirmed spectacularly by Louisiana State University Dr. Michael L. Kurtz in his Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian's Perspective (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982). Even Kurtz's subtitle exemplifies his lack of authentic scholarship, for all his PhD credentials: there were two Kennedy assassinations, contrary to his subtitle.

Because Kurtz is a history professor, the media greeted his book as the ultimate in scholarship and dependability, but as usual, there were no checks on his "scholarship" or even on his grasp of the material about which he wrote his book.

It was reviewed for the September, 1983 Journal of American History by a lawyer who was university educated as historian before turning to the law, Jim Lesar.

After pointing out that Kurtz draws on the uncredited work of others he then deprecates Lesar concludes his review in these words:

This book lacks scholarship. The author makes blatant factual mistakes and important errors of omission: Mark Lane's Rush to Judgement (1966) is not the first book on the subject; the wounding of James Tague is totally ignored. There are falsehoods: the Warren Commission was not "[u]naware of the FBI's real attitude toward it"; to the contrary, its members stated in their secret sessions that the FBI "would like to have us fold up and quit," and they also asserted that the FBI had concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin without having "run out all kinds of leads." Kurtz relies on commission testimony by an FBI agent contradicted by FBI records and on the results of tests performed for the House committee on evidentiary items inexplicably different in size, shape, and weight from the original FBI specimens without evincing any awareness of the discrepancies. The book's footnotes retard rather than advance scholarship: they generally do not support the assertions made in the text, nor do they identify with requisite specificity the materials cited.

In his last chapter Kurtz forgoes his vow against speculation -- already broken -- and reconstructs the assassination. He hypothesizes that a shot that hit Kennedy in the back -- he asserts at an upward angle -- was fired from the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. Here he whooshes across the line separating speculation from fantasy. His assertion that "the first two floors of the Depository were lower than the limousine at the time of the shots" requires a feat of levitation that is neither recorded on any film of the assassination nor testified to by any eyewitness.

Kurtz rightly calls attention to the need for professional historians to appraise the assassination of President Kennedy and the official investigations into the crime. Unfortunately, this book does not measure up to the demands of that gargantuan task.

(Where Lesar refers to Kurtz "whooshing", in the official account, with which it is safely assumed Kurtz has at least a nodding acquaintance, all the shots were fired four storeys higher, from the sixth floor.)

In 1994, on the undergraduate level, in a New York university a professor assigned several of the nuttier assassination books for critical analysis along with that most completely dishonest of them, Gerald Posner's mistitled Case Closed, for written critical analysis and comment. Two of his students -- and I am elliptical in this to protect them from retaliation -- report he announced in advance that all who disagreed with Posner would get failing grades.

Random House asked the noted historian William Ambrose for a prepublication comment on Case Closed. Here is what appears on that book's back dust-jacket cover:

"I cannot believe that any rational reader will finish Gerald Posner's book and still be persuaded that there was a conspiracy involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy or that the assassination was the result of any act other than that of Lee Harvey Oswald acting in solitary league with himself. This is a brilliant and meticulous analysis. With the skill of a good novelist, but a novelist possessed of the facts, Posner follows Oswald's tormented movements. He fully convinces me that Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy. Case Closed has helped lay to rest one of the greatest cultural and political scandals of our time."

Asked for additional praise by Newsday's Jack Sirica, who wrote a lengthy, entirely uncritical puff piece on the book, Ambrose was even more effusive.

(Likewise, Ambrose told Rob Zaleski for the Wisconsin Capital Times of October 11, 1993, that Posner's is an "absolutely flawless" and "a wonderful, fabulous book," that is both "meticulous" and "thorough.")

Dave Wrone, also a professional historian and the coauthor of the only professional bibliography in the field, wrote Ambrose in detail about the flaws and errors in his comment on Case Closed. He concludes his letter asking Ambrose "how it is you were tripped up on Posner's effort to depict the reality of the murder of a President?"

In a somewhat snotty non-response Ambrose told Wrone, "You write a book on the subject." He also said, "I'm always open to new evidence . . . . Even when I have to eat crow."

I gave Ambrose an invitation to such a feast and gave him "new evidence" in a lengthy letter on December 29, 1993. I began a letter asking Ambrose for "the basis of those comments" used by Random House and "whether you did any checking of what Posner says at all."

When Ambrose did not response after five months I wrote him again, in greater length, including some ignorant comments he had made in his Foreign Affairs review of the previously quoted Reeves book. I did not expect any response to I made it a point to say that "In failing to respond you have made the record that will exist for history" of himself, "that can be taken as your own reflection of your regard for your reputation."

Ambrose remained mute.

On the other side of the country, the eminent chairman of the department of history at Stanford University was "outraged" that Posner's closest approximation of total dishonesty and inaccuracy in the field in which that was no easy achievement did not get the Pulitzer Prize for history, the honor for which his three-man committee of the Pulitzer history panel had recommended it. Professor David M. Kennedy also was silent when on June 9, 1994 I asked him, "Did any of you prestigious eminences (in history) ask yourselves if you were in a position to evaluate that book? By other than taking his word?"

I sent copies to several reporters, who published nothing at all about how the Pulitzer was nearly besmirched by ignorant professors who obviously did no checking at all. (They were overruled and there was no history Pulitzer in 1993.)

I also expressed this concern to Roger Rosenblatt, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) for the Pulitzer committee, lacking any address for it. Rosenblatt will be remembered for his PBS commentaries. I also referred him to Case Open, as I had Professor Kennedy. I heard nothing from Rosenblatt, any Pulitzer committee, anyone on the CJR staff, including a contributing editor I know, to whom I sent a separate copy of my letter and of the San Francisco Chronicle story reporting Kennedy's complaint.

Again with no responses from anyone.

So, neither the CJR nor the Pulitzer eminences of journalism care much about the reputation of their awards or the manner in which they are determined and by whom.

I doubt very much that as an editor Rosenblatt would accept a story from a reporter who could not assure him that he had checked the facts needing checking, especially on so controversial a subject. I also doubt very much that Ambrose or Kennedy would give other than a flunking grade to any student who could give not a single source for any paper he or she turned in. So, as I cautioned Ambrose, they were making their own records of their professional reputations for history.

With this the record of all of the media, and their professional sources, errant government is well aware of its immunities and exploits them to perpetuate the official assassination mythology. In this, whether or not so intended, it also shelters those who can, if only by circumstantial evidence, be believed to have been behind the JFK assassination. Of these the most probative case can be made against the military or the military with its associates in the military- industrial-intelligence complex. It is here assembled as such a case for the first time. But as with a case in court, there is no established guilt until that is decided by a jury and in this case there can be no jury.

None but public opinion.

But that public opinion can be created only by the media, the media which failed itself and the nation from the first and continues to do that. The media that did not report what I here report about the anti-American military although that information was much more accessible to it than to me. Much more of it should be and always should have been easier to acquire by the media than by any one individual.

By the media that did not report, which means did suppress, the solidly proven fact about the JFK assassination.

Most Americans have no idea what proven information is available to them. Proven, truthful, accurate information.

When the media devotes any attention to books about the assassination it goes hogwild with disinformation and misinformation that it never checks out. The two extremes of this are Posner's Case Closed, a book so thoroughly knowingly dishonest its dishonesty includes even its title, in support of the official assassination mythology; and David Lifton's Best Evidence, which is neither.

As Random House avoided any peer review before publishing Posner, so also did U.S. News and World Report, which devoted much of an entire issue, including the cover, to it. So did TIME magazine avoid any peer review of Lifton's concoction when it bought the rights to it from Macmillan in 1980. If TIME had asked Macmillan if it had had any peer review it would have known that Macmillan avoided that norm of nonfiction.

It simply is not possible that when mature people at Macmillan's first read Lifton's book two things were not obvious to it. One is that what is new in his book is an absolutely impossibility. The other is that it would be very profitable.

So, from reliable reports, instead Macmillan had Lifton schooled in frustrating questioning so the extensive appearances it would arrange for him to sell the book would contribute to that sale while frustrating exposure of what is so impossible, so completely irrational, in Lifton's book.

In this Macmillan's judgment was correct. The book had enjoyed simply enormous sale and interest. It developed a cult the support of which Lifton still enjoys after almost a decade and a half. It was reprinted three times by different publishers. I have a copy of the 15th edition of one of those reprints, by Richard Gallen/Carroll & Graf.

Lifton's fantasy that on its face has no creditability was immediately shown to be false, as soon as TIME used part of it. Two refutations came from President Kennedy's Air Force aide, General Godfrey McHugh, and a Navy officer at the Bethesda Navy Hospital where the autopsy was performed. But by the time these refutations were published millions of people had been deceived, misled, misinformed and had their trust imposed upon by TIME as well as by Lifton and Macmillan.

It was, and I say "was" because in recent years he has had to vary his fiction as he hears what disproves it from others, Lifton's sole contribution to assassination mythology in return for which he got so much money, that the President's body was stolen from Air Force One on the trip back to Washington, was then spirited to the Army's Walter Reed Hospital, where the medical evidence it bore was altered, and then was snuck into the Navy hospital by a back gate. (Which it happens had been locked securely three hours earlier as a means of crowd contract, with no sailor on duty to unlock it for any top brass making that demand.) McHugh was only one of the assassinated President's staff who never left the casket on that trip, even for a minute. For most of that trip -- all but for the short period of time she stood with President Johnson when he took the oath of office -- the widow sat next to that casket. So, as unless they were all idiots at Macmillans and at all the reprinters, which the financial success of all refutes, they knew immediately that what Lifton evolved was a superspectacular fraud. But like Hitler's statement about making a lie credible, make it a very big lie, they all recognized that this fraud had the profit potential it reached.

Another of the refutations to TIME that it printed disproves Lifton's fabrication about trickery with the ambulance in which the casket was transported to the Navy Hospital.

Between the extreme of Posner and Lifton, each of whom knew what he was doing, and the reason he did it is a strange man with the strangest books and like Lifton, with a claque that adores him for what he has written, a following that, as with Lifton, regards him as a national treasure. His first two books he titled High Treason and High Treason 2. His second alone had more sales, reached and misled more people, than any books other than Lifton's in the lunatic fringe of disagreement with the official mythology. His third, Killing the Truth, is admirably self-
descriptive.

These and other books of that genre in disagreeing with the official mythology are the major force in the creation of their own mythologies, mythologies that are extended and enhanced by the supposed news-letters like what I comment on above from The Fourth Decade.

Livingstone's major contribution to these mythologies is not of his own invention. He adopted it and presents it as his own. It is the palpably false claim that in the assassination the back of the President's head was blown out. To make this seem credible an entire additional series of mythologies was necessary, but they did not tax Livingstone's facility in creating them. As he for his own purposes added to them his capacity for invention was inexhaustible.

Illustrative of how the established fact means nothing to those like Livingstone is that he wrote and published two supposedly assassination books without every studying the best of the films on it, that taken by Abraham Zapruder. It has been available for examination at the Archives from the time the first of the Commission's records were accessioned. Bootleg copies have been readily available since not later than 1967. And his co-author on his second book has excellent prints, the best in private hands that as a film technician he made form the original or from a copy made from the original.

When Livingstone phoned to tell me he was working on a documentary for TV and was for the first time going to examine that film, he asked what he should look for in it. "Harry," I told him, "you will not want to see that. It will make you very unhappy."

"I want to know the truth, regardless of what it is" is approximately what he then insisted. So I explained to him where in that film, after the fatal head shot that did blow the right side of the President's head out, he would see several clear frames that show the back of the head intact, with not a speck of blood on it, on the shirt collar or on the jacket.

Three weeks later he called to thank me, to say, "I was wrong and I'm glad to know it."

Faced with the fact that he had made a small fortune from a book that claims the back of the head was blown out, and firm in the conviction that whatever oozes into his head is true because he is always right, he convinced himself that the Zapruder film was doctored. That invention is essential in his personal killing the truth.

The frames of that film are but eight millimeters wide. Alteration of them required microforgery, and that not only of the original but of all the copies made from it not all of which were in government hands. Without forging the original and every print the forgery was easily exposed and that oaf the frames most often and carefully examined.

Aside from all the many problems in creating such a forgery on what is magnified greatly in being printed and ever so much more when projected, can it be imagined how conspicuous the most minuscule marking of the tiny frames would be when projected? Including the sprocket holes on the side by means of which the film is moved through the camera, the film is but a half- inch wide. When enlarged and projected onto a screen magnification is enormous. The screen on which I projected that film for study is five fee wide! But the film is actually on a trifle more than a quarter of an inch in width.

The incredible irrationality of this and more like it was no barrier to his being published. But if rationality had ever been a factor in his publication, he would have been able to publish nothing.

Absolutely convinced that this complete impossibility was the reality as soon as it emerged from the murk of his mind he then convinced himself that I was a co-conspirator in the assassination. Before that he had insisted to me that others he named also were, and there was no fact that dented the firmness of his certainty about his childish fabrication.

But what choice did he have? Could he admit, especially to himself, that all the work of which he was so proud was nonsense? Of course not, so there emerged this enormous conspiracy against him. By those who really wanted only to have nothing to do with him.

When others found out that he was firmly convinced of the validity of all this and so much more craziness they were able to and they did use him to get vengeance they wanted on others. They fed him more nonsense. The wilder it was the more impressed with it he was.

He even expected and demanded that those who had nothing to do with the assassination confess to him their involvement in it. He demanded of me, in writing, that I pressure them, which I could not do in any event, to confess. When they did not his abuses of and threats to them were indecent and irrational beyond belief, as were the childish trick he used to try to get confirmation from them of what they were not in any way involved in.

And so emerged his third book the central doctrine of which as he presents it was the assassination conspiracy he adopted from a fake book by the French CIA, Farewell America. When I told him this and that it was and I had proven it to be a fraud he asked, "But it tells the truth, doesn't it?" When I replied with an emphatic "no!" that merely added to his conviction that I was a co-conspirator with one of his and the French SDECE's more prominent men in the vast Texas-wide conspiracy Livingstone took from their fake book.

Crazy as it so obviously is, his book, like Lifton's and Posner's, had no peer review. Based on the sale of his second book the publisher, Carroll & Graf, anticipated great profits so why jeopardize all that money with any peer review?

There is one point of rationality in Livingstone's personal killing of the truth, where he writes, "maybe I am crazy". Lifton made no such mistake in his book. But in private correspondence copies of which I have he detailed how he would steal a fine print of the Zapruder film. He followed this up with another letter boasting how he had pulled that off.

These are the writers loved by the publishers, the authors of the most terrible books that make money by deceiving people and rewriting our history. That they make money is the sole publisher requirement.

I give more and more detailed attention to these works of disinformation in my as of this writing unpublished lengthy book manuscript, Inside the JFK Assassination Industry.

By their invalid criticism of the military, of which valid criticism could and should easily have been made, Lifton and Livingstone both contributed much to media and popular unwillingness to credit any legitimate criticisms of the military and unwillingness even to consider them. With the media in particular, the endless repetition of such disgraceful fabrications as Lifton's that it snatched the body from a military plane, took it in secret in one military hospital where military doctors altered it and the evidence it held and then, in a military ambulance, took it still in secret to another military hospital so that the military doctors there would prepare and issue a phony autopsy report after examining the body, is enough to persuade most of the media that all criticism of the military that it does not ignore entirely must be more overwhelmingly substantiated than is the usual media standard. Lifton's kind of preposterous fabrication built sympathy for the military and distracted from its record that required careful examination and understanding. It also destroyed willingness to consider whether there had been an assassination conspiracy because it required a simply enormous number of military people to know about it, to have been involved in it, and to have preserve perpetual secrecy about it.

Aside from this practice of Hitler's dictum about the big lie, the lie was made even bigger because to begin with the snatching of the body required knowledge of and participation in it by the President's own staff and even his widow!

The more attention Lifton got as he barnstormed this country and Canada, the more exposure Macmillan arranged for him, especially on radio and TV, having prepared him to deflect answers to any embarrassing questions, the more any criticism of government of any kind was discredited to begin with. In the minds of the rational people, at least.

It also had the same effect on the willingness of reasonable people to consider that the government lied in its claimed assassination solution or that the assassination was by a conspiracy.

In books Random House and Macmillan are major media. Each of them commercialized and exploited the assassination, from the opposite extremes, each of them in this misled and confused their trusting readers and most of the American public, and thus each made a major contribution to the across-the-board failures of the major media.

For money and nothing else.

When CBS gave Posner major attention in its 1993 TV special on the assassination it had a poll taken. After that major propaganda effort that reached so large a percentage of the American people, a larger majority then ever refused to believe it and the official mythology -- nine out of ten Americans!

Although Case Open was published on the cheap, without a single ad for it and not a single review in any newspaper or magazine. I received innumerable phone calls and several hundred letters from strangers with a few weeks. Not one failed to praise it and to thank me for doing it.

The major media confused the people more but it did not persuade them to believe it of the official mythology it supported, a rare tribute to the common sense of the people on this question.

In all I reached only an insignificantly tiny percentage of the people compared with those the fraudulent books reached but the reaction to Case Open was 100 percent disagreement with Posner and the official mythology with the exception of a single letter from one of Posner's fans, defending himself, not Posner.

So, despite the fact that virtually none of the people have access to factual writing about the assassination, an overwhelming majority of them refuse to believe either the official mythology or the private versions of it.

This represents quite a large potential market for honest, factual books but I know of no single publisher who has sought or commissioned any honest, factual book on the assassination.

The attitude this represents, the publisher policy it defines, an almost universal publisher policy from the instant those bullets that turned the world around were fired in Dallas, is one of the reasons the conspiracy to assassinate the President, which means the conspiracy to change our national policy, continued to avoid exposure to the people. It is the counterpart of the government conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself that I expose in NEVER AGAIN!

There was and is no way any private person or persons can now solve the crime.

And all the years of misleading and lying to the people from both extremes, has served to protect those conspirators who did turn the world around.

CONCLUSIONS: Waketh the Watchman?

This book, this approach, this reasoning and mustering of what addresses motive, means and opportunity, is made necessary by -- is the inevitable result of -- the de facto government conspiracy not to investigate the crime itself; by its foisting off on the sorrowing and trusting people of an "official truth" that is the official mythology; by the palpably false and dishonest "solution" to what was correctly called "the crime of the century"; and by the failures of all the media to do as it should have done.

This leaves nothing with which to seek to provide what may be the most dependable of the possible explanations of it but assessing motive, means and opportunity, assessment of the circumstantial evidence.

In this approach no other force or combination of forces can equal in motive that of the military and its complex. Particularly not in their determined opposition to President Kennedy's policies and his refusal to accept the policies they pressed upon him endlessly and which they, when they could, did imposed upon him. They did this despite their knowledge that it was not what he wanted, was not what the national policy he alone had the Constitutional authority to set -- was the opposite to it. They severely limited what he as President could do.

Article. I, Section 1. of the Constitution reads, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives."

This Article deals with the powers and responsibilities of the Congress. In Section 8 of Article 1., the declaring of war and what relates to it is reserved to the Congress exclusively. Section 8. begins, "The Congress shall have Power To", followed by the enumeration of those powers exclusively of the Congress. In it we find:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Article. II., Section 1, begins, "The executive Power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America." It continues defining his term, how he shall be elected, removed, paid and the oath he must take. His role as commander in chief is stated in the first words of Section 2.:

"The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion in writing of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have the power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in cases of Impeachment."

Under our Constitution the power to declare war is vested exclusively in the Congress. The President may not under the Constitution declare war or start one. His sole duty as conceived and assigned to him relating to war is as commander in chief of the armed forces.

All other than this is the usurpation of powers over the years by them, that presidents do not have by our presidents. There was nothing the Congresses could do about that other then impeach the president or withhold money from his office and/or the armed forces, neither a reasonable means of controlling any president without causing the greatest of difficulties, suffering and close to insoluble problems. That in our entire history only one President has been impeached illustrates how under most circumstances that it not a reasonable means of controlling any out-of- control president. So, over the years, many of them have usurped the war-making powers they are denied under the Constitution. Truman took us into an extremely costly and hurtful war in Korea, where we are still bogged down, and Johnson did in Vietnam. His successor, Nixon, kept us there. Nixon could have ended that war much sooner than he did. That he did not was because doing it could have caused him not to be re-elected. So, billions of dollars and countless lives were cost and ruined in that undeclared war he could have settled years earlier on better terms that the total ignominious defeat suffered because he did not.

War has been redefined to violate the clear language of the Constitution, like calling it a "police action."

No president has authority, under the Constitution, to start what was considered by the Eisenhower administration, a "preventive war" against the USSR. Any kind of war, under the Constitution, can be started only with a declaration of it and the right and power to declare war is vested exclusively in the Congress.

This was true of the Bay of Pigs. It was true at the time of the Cuba Missile Crisis. It was true of Vietnam in which our involvement began in the Eisenhower administration, under the pressures of Vice President Nixon and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. It is true of any implementation of the subhuman SIOP military scheme for devastating much of the world and poisoning all the rest of it. It is true of all the wrongful things our military did to increase our involvement in Vietnam did by violating the wishes and orders of its commander in chief.

All those presidents who involved us in undeclared wars, no matter how they redefined "war" and rewrote the Constitution, were lawless presidents and in each and every one of those undeclared wars the country suffered greatly for it. The framers of the Constitution were wiser men than the president who waged those many undeclared wars.

In each and every instance where the military usurped the powers restricted exclusively to either the Congress or the president, the former to declare war and the latter to be commander in chief, as he is exclusively, there was a great and a very costly disaster.

The framers of our Constitution were wiser men than of the generals and admirals who through they knew best and believing that did wrong.

But so many presidents, so many generals and admirals, believed that they knew and understood better than those who created this nation and stated its principles and set forth in clear language who has what power and who does not, and none ever learned from the disasters caused the entire nation, save for the great profits of a tiny minority, by each and every violation of the Constitution. None ever learned. All were wiser than our Founding Fathers, they all believed, and none learned from the past.

As the people are never told and only a very few understand, each and every violation of the Constitution has had disastrous consequences and costs that have brought the country to its present wretched and extremely dangerous condition, financial, economically, politically and socially. The life of the nation has been controlled for years by violations of the Constitution, all given fine-sounding descriptions, purposes and definitions to make them acceptable.

Like "preventive war." There is no such thing. Preventive war means and is no more than sneaking a start to a war that under the Constitution, it cannot be repeated or emphasized too much, is a power restricted exclusively to the Congress. And it cannot, under the Constitution, escape that responsibility by giving it a different name or by paying no attention to the president waging war without declaration of it by the Congress.

We are where we are, we suffer as we do, and those of great wealth will also suffer if what is not impossible, a collapse is the result. Socially and politically we are already at that point and well past it. Economically, by any honest and rational appraisal, we are ruined and our future is wasted by all those violations of the Constitution because of their financial costs alone and the changed nature of the economy they required.

A few of the rich are richer and millions have neither homes nor jobs nor educations to prepare them for productive lives nor the means of caring for themselves or their families, without any hope for the future, and they are forced to live in the streets, families including infants with them.

All the direct cause of deliberate violations of the Constitution.

All coming from unConstitutional military activities, wars by different names, not one a meaningful success except in the propaganda terms to create this false belief, and all costing in dollars alone a sum that in my youth could not be imagined in even the wildest dreams.

Dollars denied urgent national needs from which the country suffers and will suffer more, dollars of debt that bleed the nation and deny much of it its present and its future. The debt that takes what is needed for real needs that are not met because of these wasted costs of the past, the debt that prevents the meeting of real needs in the present and is so great the interest alone on it denies the possibility of meeting present and urgent needs.

The debt that those who would waste more on the military attribute to everything but that, especially meeting the social, everyday needs of millions of Americans. Of even those not in financial distress because they cannot afford to educate their children so they can be happy and productive, of service and value to the nation, in their futures.

All of this traces back to the military, to the military of the present and of the last, to military of adventures, the military in virtually constant violation of the Constitution.

The military of tunnel vision that conceives itself patriotic not recognizing that this kind of patriotism requires genuine subversion, violation of our Constitution, or does not care that it does.

The military that never learns from all its mistakes of the past and their terrible costs and repeats them as authentic patriotism as it conceives patriotism.

The military in a perpetual state of lawlessness and is too ignorant of basic American belief and our Constitution or too contemptuous of it, the military that regards itself as all-knowing, as all-understanding, and those who do not agree with them as obstacles or worse.

The military that after World War I was indoctrinating young Americans against our democratic system by describing as "mobocracy."

As we have seen of this military in recent years -- not all of it by any means but those in control of it -- it is the miliary of the Eisenhower administrations' consideration of a sneak attack, war by stealth, against the Soviet Union when it was on its knees after the unimaginable devastation it suffered in World War II, the military of the so-called "preventive war."

The military that agreed to the Bay of Pigs invasion plan of its complex partner, the Central Intelligence Agency, well aware of the fact that inevitably that plan had disastrous failure built into it, the plan that had as its real purpose starting a war with tiny Cuba to save those of the guaranteed-to-fail invasions and to save face for the President who was so thoroughly and deliberately deceived to create this condition for the beginning of another undeclared war, still another of the always disastrous violations of the Constitution.

And when he refused to be suckered into that evil, that certain disaster even if he had gone along, even when as inevitably it would have been, Cuba was defeated. The disaster suffered with each and every "success" of any such schemes, as in Vietnam and many other places all around the world.

The military that wanted war instead of peace at the time of the Cuba Missile Crisis; the military and its complex partner the CIA that then violated orders, as in flying prohibited U-2 flights over the USSR at the height of that crisis; the military that opposed the peace with which that crisis ended and violated orders that could prevent the peace; the military that wanted to attack Cuba even after, despite its best and strongest efforts peace was achieved.

The military that had arranged for it, not the President, to control the use of nuclear weapons, and for it to be able to just wipe out much of the world without regard for poisoning all the rest of it with its SIOP-63 ultimate in war without the authorization of the President and contrary to his expressed desires as President and as commander in chief.

The military that insists there is an urgent need for more and more advanced equipment, more and more development of new equipment and means of waging war, including more nuclear weapons when our stockpile is ever so much great than required to end the world completely, when we are supposed to be reducing and then eliminating them and when we demand that others reduce and eliminate their's while we increase and update ours. Greatly increasing the national debt to do that, with all the many costs that means and the failure to meet what are genuinely national needs because of it. Because of it, now and in the past, millions of Americans are without medical care and those who saw to it that medical care for them could not be enacted by the Congress in 1994 are those who clamor for still more military expenditures for which that money is used.

The military of whom Hamilton said in The Federalist Papers, and this cannot be repeated too often, that "it is truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain least suspicion." The military over the ages, not just ours of modern times.

The military of whom, after a long professional lifetime in it and heading it in war and with the foresight that came from looking back on his own mistakes Eisenhower warned in his "farewell" address on leaving office, on January 17, 1961:

". . . we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sough or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes."

As we have seen, this was more than a warning. It was a prediction and it came to pass almost immediately, behind his successor's back and then to his face.

That was the year of the SIOP.

It was the year before the prescient and popular novel, Seven Days in May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, two experienced Washington correspondents, laid Eisenhower's warning out so terrifyingly. (Harper & Row, New York, 1962)

In modern times, it is this kind of dedicated military "patriotism" that inflicted military dictatorships on the world. Or the tyrants selected by the military and kept in power by it.

With this only part of the public record we have seen and that only part of the full record; with this the concept of patriotism that dominates those who control the military, how much of an added step is it to eliminate the man who stood in the way of all those military plans, hopes, aspirations?

When that was the only way they could be achieved.

How, with their beliefs, could they regard that President as other than unpatriotic, strong and fixed as was their belief that they were the true patriots, they and they better than any others seeing and understanding the need of their true patriotism, the need of the country as they saw it?

The military the public record of which was never assembled and made comprehensible for the people, as to a degree I herein undertake to try to do.

Only the public record.

The military that goes off and wages war on its own during the undeclared war in Vietnam. In his for the most part excellent drawing together the case for lying as national policy and the indispensability in it of wrongful secrecy in his The Politics of Lying, David Wise tells how one general in Vietnam involved 40,000 American men and among other things 400 fighter- bombers the cost of all which may have exceeded the entire national budget in the years of my youth in unauthorized attacks, jeopardizing lives and those costly planes, for almost a half year. The Max Frankel quoted in the beginning of this excerpt was a New York Times editor:

Lying is not a new phenomenon in American history or politics, but there is, after all, a question of degree and frequency, and surely nothing in our past has matched, in scale and quality, the grand deception of Vietnam. What Max Frankel has termed "the habit of regular deception in our politics and administration" is something new, and shameful. Systematic deception as an instrument of highest national policy is, God knows, hardly a cause for national pride.

What else but such a policy would result in the horror of My Lai being briefed "as one of our successful operations"? What else but such a policy could produce a General John D. Lavelle, the head of the Seventh Air Force, who commanded 400 fighter-bombers and 40,000 men, and whose pilots bombed North Vietnam at least 147 times without authorization between November of 1971 and March of 1972? Some of them filed false reports claiming they had been fired upon, for General Lavelle had made it plain to his pilots that they could not report the air strikes had taken place without enemy provocation. At one point Lavelle assigned three men, he later explained to a Congressional committee, "to try to find out how we could continue doing what we were doing but report it accurately." But the reports required so much detail that "we couldn't find a way."*

Wise's footnote at this point reads:

*Lavelle insisted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not fought a private war, and that his deputies had received tacit encouragement from his superiors, including the staff director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was denied by Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of JCS, and other officers. The Nixon administration tried to cover up the scandal. The Air Force originally announced that Lavelle had retired for reasons of "health." Later General John D. Ryan, Air Force Chief of Staff, said he had relieve the general as a result of the bombing raids. Ryan testified that he had recommended that Congress be told the truth, but was overruled -- by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. (pages 342-3)

For almost a half a year one general allegedly wages his private war, undetected and uncontrolled? Can that be believed? Not if he told the Congress the truth in testifying that this was approved and encouraged all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff!

Wise had no secret sources on this, yet none of the media ever put it all together so the people could know and understand it, the people whose sons' lives were endangered and wasted by the general encouraged to wage that unauthorized war by all above him other than the President. It was all public, published. Wise merely put it together to give it meaning. Here is his source note:

The Max Frankel quote is from his reply to Daniel P. Moynihan in Commentary, July, 1971, p. 16. The data on the number of planes and men under the command of General John D. Lavelle are from Newsweek, June 26, 1972, p. 17. Lavelle's testimony is from The New York Times, June 13, 1972, pp. 1, 6. His claim that his superiors tacitly encouraged his actions is from The New York Times, October 7, 1972, p. 6. General John D. Ryan's testimony that he was prevented from telling the truth by Melvin Laird is from the Washington Post, September 26, 1972, p.1. (page 400)

This was not important enough for any of the many wealthy and well and competently staffed components of the major media to have put it together and let the people know about it when knowing about it could have had some meaning? Might have saved a few lives or a few millions if not billions of dollars?

But none did.

This gets us to the responsibility of the major media, aside from its unended failure to either investigate or report impartially on the assassination and its investigations, its failure to report the truth about that undeclared, that unConstitutional war in Vietnam and that evaluation of our military. Wise does defend the media. This is not unexpected for a man who was for so long a Washington correspondent for a major newspaper:

Granted that the government can use backgrounders to shape the truth, there are other factors that may lead to news distortion. Misinformation may result not only from government manipulation but from the shortcomings and failures of the press itself.

No institution is without flaws, or exempt from criticism. Much of the recent criticism of the press, however, has arisen from suspect motives and had tended to focus on false issues. (page 305)

That might have been true of the media of the time of which he here writes in his chapter "The Government and the Press." He there is talking about the beleaguered Nixon administration. It is not true of the military. As I report above, reporters in Vietnam knew our military was lying its head off and they reported that -- in foreign papers, not for Americans to read and understand.

Without realizing that it relates to himself, too, in what he omits about the press and the assassination and his avoidance of that in his cataloguing of official lying, here is how he concludes this chapter:

There is, of course, only one side that a constitutionally free press can be on, and that is the side of truth. But to fulfill that role requires a singular tough- mindedness. The press, despite criticism from political leaders, needs to question, probe, analyze, and interpret more, not less. It should resist government pressures and self-generated pressures. It must not succumb to the seduction of power, nor automatically accept government handouts and leads as fact. IF the press acts as a mere transmission belt for government pronouncements, then it contributes to the credibility gap, and to the erosion of trust that has already divided the people from their government. (page 311)

Who in the media did not fail "to fulfill that role" of the "constitutionally free press", did not "succumb to power" and did not "succumb" to "government handouts and leaks" when the President was assassinated? Did any of it, any one component of any of the media, ever "question, probe, analyze and interpret" the Report on the assassination and its investigations? Was there a greater issue? One more important to the nation, to its political system, to its integrity, its future, to the trust of the people in their government and their media? One that bore more on the integrity of the administration brought into power by that assassination only? One that was more a challenge to the media and to its integrity?

Can there be a matter of greater importance than a coup d'etat in our country?

Is it not also true that what I here put together for the first time about the military is a matter of quintessential importance to the nation?

Wise's last words in his very important book are an excellent statement of the role of the media in a democratical society, what it must do to fulfill its Constitutional role, the role it did not fill as the Constitution envisioned. He has been talking about media acceptance and publishing what is given to it for use without attribution in backgrounders. He says what is obvious, that the media as a whole should insist on being able to identify its quoted sources:

More important than this, however, is that the press -- particularly at a time when it has been under government pressure and attack -- continue to question, probe, analyze, and interpret the statements and actions of the government. The press, of all our institutions, must surely have learned over the past two decades that what the government says may not be true. If there is any one major shortcoming of the American press over recent years, it has been the tendency to accept the word of the government despite repeated evidence that -- particularly in the national security area -- the government may be lying. (page 354)

This is precisely what the media failed to do, abdicated when faced with it, when the President was assassinated, what it did not do faced with what the military was doing. Wise continues, nothing omitted in quotation:

Shortly before he died, Hugo Black wrote a memorable opinion in the case of the Pentagon Papers. "In the First Amendment," he wrote, "the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors . . . The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."

Lying and secrecy have no place in a democracy. It is possible to debate the meaning of "the consent of the governed" and the rule of public opinion in a democracy. It may be that the public, in one sense, can express its consent only by voting, but few would argue that the public should not have some influence on government policy between elections. "Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy," the late V.O. Key, Jr., has written, "all the talk about democracy is nonsense."

For democracy to work, however, the governed must know to what they are consenting. If they are misled, if the truth is concealed from them by the same government that demands their sons, their loyalty, and their treasure, then the American experiment is doomed to end in repression and failure.

Possibly it has been put best by Sam Gibbons, a plain-spoken congressman from the Florida Gulf Coast. In June of 1971 Sam Gibbons, who served with the 101st Airborne Division, jumped into France on D-Day, and fought at Bastogne, was testifying at a House subcommittee hearing on the Pentagon Papers, and he had a question.

"How can you give your consent to be governed," he asked, "when you are misled and lied to?" (pages 354-5)

Under our Constitution our media is "free and unrestrained" by the government.

But the Constitution does not protect the people from restraints the media imposes upon itself.

While it may be possible, as Wise writes, "to debate the meaning of 'the consent of the governed' and the role of public opinion in a democracy," what it is not possible to debate is that by every measure, by every poll, there was and is no "consent of the governed" on the record of all governments since the assassination of President Kennedy. Not when at the end of 1993 nine out of every ten Americans were entirely dissatisfied with it.

And save for those that reported this statistic, the entire media was silent.

Does not this and its failure to report fully and truthfully about the military justify what Wise quotes, "All the talk about democracy is nonsense!"?

Does this not indicate that, Wise's trenchant observation, "If they (the people) are misled, if the truth is concealed from them . . . . then the American experiment is doomed to end in repression and failure"?

The media that knows the government lies to it and to the people nonetheless reported all its lies about the assassination of President Kennedy as the truth.

There is nothing more basic to and subversive of our democracy than a real or de facto coup d'etat. Even when not the intent it is actuality that is the inevitable result of the assassination.

There thus is nothing in this country as vital to our democracy of as urgently needed as having needed as having "the secrets of government" bared, Justice Black's words. Also in his words, that the media be able to do this, as it must do for democratic society to be viable, meaningful, the "Founding Fathers gave and assured the free press the protection it must have to "fulfill its essential role in our democracy."

With regard to that assassination, its investigations and the official lying about it, including the lying by the military about the wretchedly poor and misleading autopsy it controlled and reported on the media has failed to "fulfill its essential role."

In considering this one part of the circumstantial-evidence case against the military, its deliberately false and dishonest autopsy report about which it did commit repeated perjury, the autopsy report that is basic in any criminal investigation, I am reminded that none of the media reported what I brought to light in Post Mortem, that the first thing the military did when the autopsy examination was about to be started was to expel all civilians from the autopsy room and place a military guard around it to prevent any civilians from entering it. And as I also report there, only for that also not to be reported by the media, all the military personnel at the autopsy was given the written threat that if anyone there ever uttered a word about that autopsy they would be subject to court martial.

The military alone, by the way, could have and had both the "means" and the "opportunity" to control that autopsy examination and what it reported; and as I also brought to light in Post Mortem, used that means to alter basic facts of the crime and of the wounds and their location in what the autopsy pathologist -- this military pathologist -- has in his second autopsy report. Without any comment from the media -- or denial from him this military pathologist. As I also reported in that book, again without attention to it by the media, he actually burned the autopsy report he had drafted when it was believed that it would be subjected to examination and cross-examination at Oswald's trial as soon as the military knew that Oswald had been killed and there would be no trial.

This should be clearly understood. It is without precedent in our nation's life. What also must be clearly understood is the fact that it was all unreported by the media on its own or after I published it:

The military arranged for and had complete control over the autopsy.

It expelled all civilians from the autopsy examination.

It posted a military guard to keep civilians out of that autopsy room and the autopsy examination being conducted in it.

It threatened each and every military person present with court martial if they ever uttered a word about that autopsy examination.

After it prepared the report on its autopsy examination, the report drafted in the expectation it would have to be produced, examined and cross-examined in the public trial of the accused Lee Harvey Oswald had been killed and there would be no trial at which its autopsy report would be subject to that rigorous public scrutiny and questioning.

Then even the second autopsy report, the one written as soon as the military knew Oswald was dead, was substantively altered by the military. Those alternations were of the most basic facts of the crime, where the President suffered bullet wounds, their location and description.

Then the military testified falsely about their autopsy examination and their report on it. Three military pathologists, the second two swearing falsely by swearing their agreement with the initial perjury!

Then there were official, non-military examinations by the most eminent expects the government could get, and their report proves that the military autopsy report did lie about the most basic of the medical evidence in its second autopsy report, the one the military knew would not be subjected to rigorous and public examination.

All of this I published in 1975, all of it based on official records that had been hidden, suppressed or both. All of it and every so much more official proof that related to it. Without a word of protest from any in or formerly in the military. And the media ignored this incredible military performance, its ghastly record when the President, its commander-in-chief, was assassinated and when it controlled what was most basic to the investigation of that assassination that was a de facto coup d'etat.

Was there ever in our history any greater need to "bare the secrets of government and inform the people?"

The media did not "fulfill its essential role in our democracy" by reporting this on its own, when it could have obtained the official proof much more easily and rapidly than I. It then failed itself and the rest of us and our democratic system by not reporting it when I published it and made it freely available to all.

This official record, this military record alone requires that the military be suspected.

Then there is the clear and substantial case of "motive" I bring together in this book.

When I was a child more than six decades ago we were taught American history as it is not taught today. We were taught that the writer Tom Paine was among the greatest of American heroes when our Founding Fathers fought against such awful, intimidating odds to establish the first really democratic society, fought with so many suffering so greatly to be able to fight and from that fighting. We were taught that to a large degree Jefferson was indebted to Tom Paine for his magnificent Declaration of Independent. Paine's then revolutionary writing in support of a free and democratic society, despite the primitive nature of both printing and distribution in those days, was read by a greater percentage of Americans so many of whom in those days could not read then anything every written by any American since then.

One of his enduring phrases in which he described the great dangers and problems confronting our forbears in establishing freedom and democracy is, "These are the times that try men's souls."

We then were taught about Tom Paine, taught to respect and admire him and what he risked to write and speak forthrightly to inspire those who fought against such great odds. We were taught that he is an American hero.

Today our children complete high school without ever hearing his name. Some graduate college and never heard of Tom Paine.

There have been many changes in our lives and in what our young are taught since I was a boy so long ago. I am more than a third as old as the United States of America. Not including any mention of Tom Paine in educating our young is not consistent with teaching them our great traditions and then revolutionary beliefs.

In our modern life was there ever anything that more than what I set forth here "tries men's souls"?

None of which was ever put together, ever, by the media for the people to understand.

Justice Black's words again, "The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people, its essential role on our democracy."

But our watchmen over our democracy did not do that when it needed being done, at the time of that assassination, that coup d'etat, or then in that radical and terribly disastrous change in national policy caused by that coup d'etat. It has not fulfilled its Constitutional role ever since its initial failure to do so. And thus there lingers the question was it a miliary coup d'etat, of which there is the substantial case here set forth.

Will our media even fulfill that watchman role assigned it by our Constitution?

Waketh the watchman?

The old saying of ancient times, when cities were protected at night by watchmen, is "Lest the Lord guard the city, the watchman waketh in vain."

The lord of our safety, of our independence, of the protection of our Constitution and all that means, is the watchman of the Constitutional free media with its "essential role in our democracy" for it to "fulfill."

Late as it now is, waketh that watchman now?

Bibliography (permissions to be obtained)

The Federalist Papers

One Thousand Days (Houghton Mifflin)

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye

Thirteen Days (W.W. North and Company)

JFK and Vietnam (Warner)

Undercover: Memoirs of an American Agent (Berkley/Putnam) E. Howard Hunt 1974

President Kennedy: Profile of Power

The New Republic

Farewell America (Frontiers)

Kennedy (Harper & Co.) Theodore Sorensen

Cuba On the Brink

The Missile Crisis

The Politics of Lying (Random House) 1973

Vietnam, Stanley Karnow

United States Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, hearings, 1960

Journal of American History, the, September, 1983

Best Evidence, David Lifton, MacMillan, New York, 1980

Crime of the Century, Michael Kurtz, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1982

The Fourth Decade, September, 1984

Wisconsin Capitol Times, October 11, 1993

Newsday

Washington Post November 6, 1994

San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 1994

Case Closed, Random House, New York, 1993

Case Open, Richard Gallen/Carroll & Graf, New York, 1994

Oswald in New Orleans, 1967

Post Mortem, 1975

The Whitewash series

This should be added to and filled in on reading the ms. Missing dates at in it, etc.