Chapter 12

Desecrating History

Why Brown wrote his epilogue, other than a further indulgence, is as much a mystery to me after reading it a second time. He says he is a historian but there is not a single word in it that a historian writing history would write. That, of course, is true of all of his books.

He is so wrapped up in himself, so lost to his ego, especially because he is a historian, that he has no awareness that he uses his epilogue to shame himself all over again.

His first words, in his less than three full pages, state, not that he intended to, that his work has nothing to do with fact, yet fact is the substance of history. To him there is nothing but what he calls "thesis" and is in fact not even that. He refers to what he wrote and we have examined as his "thesis and supporting concepts" (page 337). As we have seen he not only has no support, he has no idea what support is.

There is no support, no possible support, in books that are obvious fakes and frauds yet he, for all his learning as a historian, could not perceive that any one of them is a fake or a fraud. If he could not recognize the fakes and the frauds on which he depends, that is a severe self- indictment in a professionally certified historian.

What he refers to as his "thesis" is his "the police did it" concoction not adopted as his own by any other member of the nuthouse that calls itself "the research community." The fabrication that the police were the assassins is his territory now.

In the course of failing to create even a legitimate suspicion that the police were the assassins he has dredged the intellectual sewers of all those would-be Perry Masons and evolved his "concept" to where most of the world was involved in the conspiracy to kill the President. There are parts of all the so-called "theories" in his book. Not a bit of it makes any sense at all except to those who, like him, dream that they have solved the crime the government saw to it could not be solved. That a criticism of the government he did not make that is probably because he is so uninformed and misinformed he cannot see it and cannot even think that way..

Fact is to him as holy water to a vampire in the well-known fiction of years ago.

Historian that he is, he writes that he hopes his book "has answered many concerns over which the reader wavered" for all the world as though that is possible with what he just made up out of nothing. Fake and fraudulent books support nothing and shunning fact is no basis for saying or believing that is the way to "answer" the "concerns" that do exist. And should.

The man is so lost in his dream world (in which, of course, he is the central genius) that he has no awareness when he condemns himself and when he lies, lies overtly, as in "I will say that you have read here the best logical deductions that can be made from the available source material. It goes without saying that the key word in the previous sentence was 'available'" (page 337).

Aside from whether the garbage he dumped on his reader is in any sense or way "logical" or even "deductions," the fact is that he deliberately ignored by far the greatest volume of the "available source material." He did this in declining access to the quarter of a million pages of JFK assassination records he could have examined here; in his steadfast refusal to look at the great volume of Commission files it did not publish; and in his total indifference to the even greater volume since made available at the National Archives under the 1992 Assassination Records Disclosure Act.

He hasn't even looked at all that "available source material" yet he assures his reader that with that, what he dares to call, his "logical deductions" come from "the best available source material." Like the nonsense that Nagell conned Russell into believing and Russell did not and could not relate to reality, to the established facts?

He is part of that nuthouse and nothing outside it has any meaning to him whereas nothing that comes from it can have any meaning.

Much of his childish nonsense he calls "logical deductions" do not even come from all that crazy literature. He just plain made it up and that without even what he regards as backing from fakes and frauds he uses.

Could he have told a much bigger or more deliberate lie than in saying he did use this "available source material," massive as it is, when he neither used it nor intended to.

As we saw, if he had, he'd have had ever so much more trouble writing his book because the book required ignorance of him, the ignorance that made it possible. Take the example of all he babbles about and bases on what he writes, the motorcade route when he had not even looked at the Secret Service record on it in the Commission's files. The truth in it disproves what he made up and, if he had known the truth, it would not have been all that easy to make up what he did in an effort to support his overall making up of an indecent and invalid false pretense of a case against the Dallas police in particular.

Referring to the government he writes: "Files dribble out" (page 339). When I, to his knowledge got almost a hundred thousand pages at one time from the FBI in early 1978, that is a "dribble"?

The two hundred cubic feet of the Commission's unpublished records is that another dribble?

And these are only part of what was "available" so long ago, before he wrote his book.

When the CIA discloses a quarter of a million pages at one time under that 1992 Act, that was no dribble, either.

Yet this is what Brown says. Whether he is this ignorant or this big a liar makes little difference in evaluating almost anything he says because it means that what he says cannot be trusted.

He regards those crazy books as the best "available" information when they are frauds and fakes and obviously so. Yet what the government releases, he says, knowing not a bit about it, is "nonsense." The rest of his sentence on files dribbling out is: "but they are just as much nonsense as was published thirty years ago."

The obvious question is how can he possibly know when he not only did not look at them, with me he declined an invitation to do that.

What can without question be said about those "dribblings" of which he has preserved total ignorance while writing about them as though he had close familiarity with them - the trusting reader has no way of knowing that he has stayed away from all that information - is that they prove the government never intended to investigate the crime and didn't and that the government's evidence proves the opposite of what the government "published." Of course those files disclose ever so much more but just take this simple formulation - what is in these words is not what those writing in the field should know and what the people should know?

The problem he and the other assassination nuts who regard themselves as Perry Masons have with this is that they believe that their childish and imagined cases and they have no basis in the established fact. Some of those records do establish certain facts beyond question. All those so called theories have to conform to the established facts or they are, ipso facto, automatically invalid. Not that they have any validity without that. They do not. Rather it is their invalidity is established and the nuts are vaporized by it.

Those "dribbled" files hold much on the shots the government acknowledged (as well as reported shots) and found bullets, grist for the mills of assassination theorists. But this is "nonsense" to the historian who prefers deliberate ignorance and regards that ignorance as a professional historian's qualification for writing.

At the same point (page 334), he says that "a recently released file," which he has in quotation marks, discloses the finding of a pistol near the scene of the crime. Quite a few such reports were disclosed to me by the FBI almost two decades ago. I have always made all those records available to all writing in the field and what is disclosed to me is available in the agencies' public reading room.

"Nonsense" is what Brown says the hundreds of thousands of pages that he refused to look at are with only his ignorance and his prejudice to support that rather large lie.

Going over a hundred thousand pages is considerable work and there are so many, many hundreds of thousands of those pages "available" now. The Browns and his associated assassination nuts are not about to even think of taking the time of plodding over all those pages. They sit in their studies, ponder their great intellects and academic achievements and then play children's games as they make up what they think is or can be attractive and as soon as they make it up they regard it as real. After all, it did come from their minds. To them that makes it the best and to them all else is "nonsense" no matter how real it is, the reality outside their Ken.

Here Brown tells the people that all is nonsense other than what he makes up.

In the time he frittered away in his repeated readings of those twenty-six volumes he could have read a rather large portion of the records he ignored. He says he actually read them four times, while regarding them, as he says he does, as "nonsense," and all he has to show for that is those silly, pointless and useless re-listings he made of the Commission's published list of witnesses. When that is not "nonsense" to him he tells us much about what he actually learned getting his doctorate in history and the uses he is capable of making of it.

The suppressed official certificate of death that had been hidden is to him, "nonsense".

The Katzenbach memorandum that he can' even quote straight and does not begin to understand is "nonsense" even though he tried to use it and did not know enough to do that!

That the notes of the autopsy have disappeared is "nonsense" to him, not something the people should know and writers should demand be disclosed. But then those notes could hold what wipes out more "theories" that are the life's blood of these assassination nuts. So naturally they do not want disclosed what can end their children's games with our history as they seek to rewrite it and desecrate it.

Many years ago the respected and learned men that day pondered and debated the number of fairies who could dance on the point of a needle. Or through its eye. That did no harm and, of course, it also did no good. But because it did no harm, society did not suffer for it.

If learning is measured by advanced degrees our learned men with their equivalents to dancing fairies and needles do and have done great harm. They have become the adjuncts of errant government and they do for it what errant government cannot do for itself. They keep the people confused and they make the government look good by comparison.

In our country today, the dancing fairies and the needle mean nothing but the assassination of a president and its official investigation are of the greatest importance.

When these vapid conspiracy theories began to proliferate not long after that assassination, particularly by and with the inspiration of Jim Garrison, the standard and effective answer was that in this country there was no chance that many people could have been involved in any conspiracy and all of them keep their mouths closed. Then came the scandal that became known as The Watergate Scandal. Only then did we learn that a large number of people could engage in a wrongful, unlawful project and that all of them could keep their jaws clamped for a while.

One of the reasons I ticked off so many, still far from all, that Brown has involved in his fantasy of an assassination conspiracy is because the number of people and institutions he has involved in it (and institutions are made up of more people) is because the number of witting conspirators he makes up is so great there is no likelihood at all that not one of them would never utter a word. Not boast. Not feel the urge to let someone in on it, in confidence, of course.

Without reviewing that army of conspirators in varying degrees and aspects, Brown actually has as conspirators in the assassination of the President, first can it be believed that there were three other assassination "teams" on the scene and doing nothing and not later saying a word?

With all the possible risks, why would the greatly increased risk of having three whole assassination "teams" there for no purpose at all?

Such ventures are always reduced to their simplest form to involve the lowest number of people. If Brown had contributed for another chapter or two he'd have had to find use for the proverbial kitchen sink in his assassination plots.

He has not a word, not a concept that it is even common sense. For example, the silly role in which he casts Oswald. The Oswald who was well enough informed so that in his arguments with his educated officers in the Marines, he could show them up. This man, really little more than a boy, could and did make his way to the Soviet Union, survived there while being openly critical of it and got back with the not only our government forgiving of his sins as a matter of law but was it loaned him money. There was no possibility at all, if it had really served a purpose in the assassination, as it did not, of him going for that stupidity of a sham assassination.

(That, by the way, is an offshoot of one of those obviously fake books Brown loves so much, Hugh McDonald's Appointment in Dallas.)

That one of the "best" of "available source material" changed radically as McDonald was evolving his fiction that he got away with having regarded as nonfiction, as Brown does. In the course of my work on it, I got three different versions of the same plot. Until he got talked out of it McDonald had Lyndon Johnson the sponsor of it. Then he dropped that.

Common sense? Plain, ordinary common sense? It is so foreign to Brown that where there is no need for it he makes up that a blank was fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano and from inside that building. There was no purpose in that and the case he tries to make up is no case at all. It has no validity at all. But if he believed it was necessary, and remember, he knows he is making it up, why not use a pistol, a relatively small weapon that will fit in a pocket?

These people are lost in the world they make up and they lack the knowledge and understanding faking that world up requires. That they know nothing troubles them naught. They believe what they make up, childish and immature as it is. Then they make up more based on that end and irrational and unreasonable and often as proven imaginary as it is, they believe that, too. It grows and grows and they never once stop to ask themselves if it could be possible.

This is not harmless like the fairies and needles debates were.

This is a representative society. It works, can work, only when the people are well and accurately informed about major issues.

The assassination of a president - any president - has an effect of a coup d'etat regardless of the intent of the assassin or assassins.

That nullifies our entire social system.

We then get a president who could become president no other way, having failed to survive the electoral process by which president's are chosen.

Because the successor is chosen as his vice-president by the successful candidate, he selects one who will appeal to that part of the electorate to which he does not appeal. That is the only way a vice-president can help a presidential candidate get elected, and helping him win the election is the basis on which a successful presidential candidate chooses his vice-presidential running-mate.

This means that when a president is assassinated the country automatically gets a new president who holds beliefs other than those of the one who was elected president. That automatically means that we have a president whose policies will be other than those for which we voted in electing the president that was assassinated.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no illusions about Joe Stalin or the Soviet Union but he believed the best policy was to get along with them. He was acutely aware of the alternative. When he died and Harry Truman succeeded him, the Truman policy was the Cold war. That was ruinous to both countries. The beneficiaries were those countries that had launched World War II, those who we had fought against and defeated. They are and long have been in better economic shape than any of the countries they attacked and who in the end and at great cost defeated them. The Japan of Pearl Harbor infamy has come to own much of the United States and its industry and it holds a not inconsiderable part of our national debt.

No assassination of any president should be a fun-and-games business for writers, but that is what these so-called assassination theorists have made of it. It is a very serious matter of which the fullest possible understanding should be available to the people.

John F. Kennedy was not yet in his grave when the government that succeeded his decided that it would not investigate his assassination but would instead ordain the assassin. From that moment on all official efforts were bent to that end and served it.

For our system to be viable, the people should be in a position to understand this as fully as is possible. Obviously, the government is not about to give people that information. Doing that would have the effect of undermining any and every government and such hallowed institutions as the FBI. This is the actual record of all the governments since the assassination.

Under our system, the duty to try to inform the people falls to writers and while they do not have the obligations of writers, to educators and scholars.

The motive of government in not telling the people the truth to the degree it can, and all the indications are that it cannot tell the truth about who the assassins are, is comprehensible.

The motives of writers who fail also are comprehensible. But their failings are less easy to accept than those of governments.

Brown and others like him not only deceive and mislead the people, they destroy the credibility of all criticism.

What they do and have done, except in degree is no less a subversion that what governments have done and continue to do.

Along with them all, the basic institutions of our society have failed, all three co-equal branches of government and the media in particular.

With the pressures on scholars from the instant and never-ending official insistence upon the official assassination mythology and the stout support of that by the media, it must be understood that those who might have made a genuinely scholarly study with the evidence available and would write about it, can be believed: they would ruin their careers if they did that.

Especially when, with the passing of time, they could see that no publisher has commissioned a critical examination of what always is one of the most significant events in our country, the change of chief executive outside the electoral process.

This does not explain why those professional scholars who did write critically about the assassination, all, like Brown, turned out disgraces of scholarship that in varying degrees had the effect of supporting the official mythology. One way in which they all did was by their monumental errors of, with all of them, basic facts. Pointing out these glaring errors and I've seen government records that do this, enables the government to say, as they often have said, "See, they are all wrong. Only we told the truth and they prove it."

Peter Dale Scott, for example, writes political treatises that boil down to his theories that do not come from the established fact. His writing as also shot full of simple but obvious factual errors.

After I had filed more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, one of which led to the 1974 amending of the Freedom of Information Act that opened FBI, CIA and other similar files to Freedom of Information Act access; after I have forced the government to disclose to me, which means to make public, a third of a million pages of once withheld records on the Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations; and after I had published seven books that at the very least are on the basis of official fact alone severely critical of the government, George Michael Evica sought a learned paper of me as a government agent for one of the regular gatherings of assassination nuts. He was a college professor.

Richard Popkin's scholarship of writing a lengthy article critical of my first book, Mark Lane's and Edward Jay Epstein's and then having it reprinted as a book. Thereafter, he became one of the most extreme of those who went ape on assassination conspiracies and regarded that as theorizing, even as fact. Another professor.

Aside from the little I say about Phil Melanson above, I've written much about his childishness, his irrationality and his factual ignorance elsewhere. That also is true of Epstein and of John Newman. As an illustration of the lingering harm from these fully-accredited scholars and their abandonment of scholarship when they wrote about the assassination, I cite Michael Kurtz. Kurtz, not long before I wrote this, asked to be a witness before the Assassination Records Review Board when it held its hearings in New Orleans, ostensibly to hear how it could meet its responsibilities under the 1992 Act while stating publicly to be in favor of all assassination records being disclosed. He traded on his professorship in the title of his book: Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian's Perspective, (University of Tennessee Press, 1982). From Kurtz's "historian's perspective," Robert Kennedy was not assassinated, only his brother had been.

Jim Lesar had almost completed work on his Master's degree in history when he decided to become a lawyer. He handled my and other Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and developed more knowledge about the assassination than probably any other lawyer in the country. The prestigious Journal of American History asked him to review the Kurtz book. While the review is limited to a single page it says more than enough about Kurtz and his, at least what he calls, his "historian's perspective":

In Crime of the Century Michael L. Kurtz laments that "professional scholars" have neglected the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; he also disparages the works of the Warren Commission critics for their "obvious bias" and lack of "careful analysis of objective evidence that characterizes the scholar." Having set the stage for his own entry, Kurtz announces an original interpretation based on carefully calculated scrutiny of the most reliable and convincing sources" and promises"much new evidence." He vows to avoid speculation because it "is not within the realm of the historian."

Kurtz concludes from his examination of the evidence that there clearly was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and that the probes of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations were seriously flawed. Although these conclusions cannot be faulted, there is virtually nothing of any consequence in this book that is new. With minor exceptions, its valid points derive from the very critics Kurtz deprecates. For example, Kurtz relies heavily on the work of Harold Weisberg and offers little information that Weisberg has not previously revealed.

This book lacks scholarship. The author makes blatant factual mistakes and important errors of omission: Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment (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 "[un]aware 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.

That review was published in the September, 1983 issue.

A dozen years later Kurtz tried to direct the Assassination Records Review Board into an anti-Kennedy family operations as his "historian's perspective" on getting withheld assassination records disclosed. Not that from his book he could understand that.

With the unrefuted Lesar review an indication of how much Kurtz knew about withheld records — indeed, about existing records that had long been disclosed - when he testified before the Assassination Records Review Board, all but one of whose members are professional historians, one of the eminences thanked Kurtz for writing his fine book and for how much it helped him, how valuable it was to him.

Kurtz even volunteered that when he was a student on New Orleans he saw Guy Banister and Lee Harvey Oswald together.

As a student when the President was killed and with Oswald, the officially ordained assassin, with Kurtz having, as he at least said, seen Oswald and Banister together, there is no indication in the FBI's records that he then told the FBI about that.

And no member of the Board or its Chairman, David Marwell, himself a professional prosecutor for the State of Minnesota, asked Kurtz if he had told the FBI what it just told it, or if there were or should be any FBI records reflecting that he had spoken to the FBI and of any subsequent investigation.

And that hearing was long, long after all the reports of an association between Oswald and Banister.

That would not have been significant information for the FBI and the Commission at the time of that investigation? That would not be information the board should see to it was made public?

Those professional scholars, historians all, did not even ask Kurtz how he knew the man he said he saw with Oswald was Guy Banister. Banister was not a professor of Tulane University.

Professor John Newman's influence on the Board as he pressures it to get records he thinks can support his untenable theory that the Cubans were "implicated" in the assassination, is so obvious that in correspondence with it I refer to that Board as the "Newman Board." As of this writing it has forced out much that has no value at all out but has not forced out, for the people, a single record that relates to the assassination itself.

How does Newman, who spent twenty years in Army Intelligence, prove the Castro "implication" in the Kennedy assassination?

He says that Castro used sex provided by Silva Duran, a Mexican citizen employed by the Cubans in Mexico City, to control Oswald as allegedly she had earlier "controlled" for Castro one of the Cubans who then was and thereafter was even more one of his most trusted associates. How and why that was arranged, Duran's alleged sexual favors to Oswald, or how that had any influence even if it had happened, does not trouble the reader of Newman's mistitled Oswald and the CIA (Carroll & Graf, 1995). In it he does not connect Oswald and the CIA.

Newman claimed two sources. One, then Elena Garro de Paz, from whom it was no more than a rumor, in any event, had a perfect record of being factually wrong in everything she said. Even the embassy said of her, "She is nuts." Which, naturally, made her a prime source.

Newman's second source was the Mexican police. It said that Duran had confessed to having sex with Oswald.

What neither the Mexican police or Newman mention is that the Mexico City CIA hot- shot warriors aching for a hot war, got the Mexican police to arrest Duran for no reason at all. They placed no charges at all against he. They beat her up but she confessed to nothing. So, those Dick Darings we had in the Mexico City Station got their chums in the Mexican police to pick her up again, and kept at it until she "confessed." Once they had that "confession" they let her go and once she could she reported what had happened and denied the truth of what had been beaten out of her.

Those not wanting to believe her can believe that she made the story about the untruth having been beaten out of her was to hide her embarrassment or something like that. However, what I report is from the disclosed CIA records - those Newman says he used in his book.

When the CIA's records for which it expected perpetual secrecy state that it got the police to arrest Duran, who had violated no law, and beat her up until she "confessed" that can not be passed off as a Duran convenience.

Nor can the vigorous protest of the Cuban government whose employee Duran was.

The CIA's first releases of two decades ago include the firm headquarters instruction for the police not to beat up Duran again. Those orders were received too late.

That same release of two decades ago reflects the longing of our Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, had to use that staged business and other palpable fakes to "do something" about Castro. But neither is in Newman's book.

Scholarship.

The truth about Garro de Paz being "nuts" and wrong in all she alleges, including "seeing" Oswald at the Duran's when he has not gone to Mexico, is in those records on which Newman says his book is based. But reporting that, like reporting that the CIA has gotten the police to beat that "confession" out of Duran, must have not been real scholarship, either.

The first official stories out of Mexico City had Oswald meeting with a Soviet Embassy official named Valerie Kostikov. He was identified as a specialist in assassinations or "wet jobs." Thirty years later these disclosed records reveal that the "wet jobs" specialty attributed to Kostikov were mere presumption. And, those same records disclose Oswald did not speak to Kostikov but to a Soviet consular official named Yatskov.

Clearly reporting this would not have been scholarly because it is not in Newman's book.

These are but a few of the many illustrations of the University of Maryland historian's scholarship included in my manuscript, Tragedy and Travesty.

There is as great a catalogue of University of Massachusetts Professor of Political Science Phil Melanson's scholarship in my peer review of his Spy Saga. That abundant cataloguing is added to considerably in what I have done with his The Murkin Conspiracy in annotating it. (Murkin, from the murder of King, is the FBI's code name for that file.) Melanson says he is an expert on intelligence matters. In the sense that a bright high school lad with a frenetic imagination has writing a novel of intelligence matters, Melanson is kind of an expert, but not in any other sense and certainly not in his writing.

His own imagination stirred by what he read in the newspapers, Melanson has the CIA making contact with the accused King assassin, James Earl Ray, by means of a letter Ray left in the open in a phone booth!

The man who found the letter and delivered it to Ray, whose assumed name and address were on that envelope, was referred to in the papers as "the fat man." Melanson, representing himself as Sherlock Holmes returned, wrote about locating that man and finding him living in mortal terror of having his identity learned. With all the spooking, he allegedly feared being knocked off.

Pretty dramatic stuff in Melanson's book.

Especially considering that "The Fat Man," was Robert McDouldton was not secret. The FBI disclosed it to me in CA 75-1996 and I gave the record to Melanson. He also was here and had free access to all I have. The Memphis FBI office, which was the "office of origin" in the King case, included this in an urgent teletype of June 12, 1968 sent to Headquarters and the Buffalo FBI office, the one closest to McDouldton in Canada (44-38861-4396).

RE BUFFALO TEL EIGHT ELEVEN P. M., JUNE ELEVEN PAST.

IT IS NOTED ROBERT MC DOULDTON IN INFORMATION FURNISHED TORONTO PD EXPLAINED HE HAD USED PUBLIC PHONE BOOTH IN VICINITY ONE SIX TWO DUNDAS STREET AND FOUND ENVELOPE THERE ADDRESSED TO SNEYD AT DUNDAS ADDRESS. REQUEST BUFFALO THROUGH LIAISON WITH TORONTO PD DETERMINE IF POSSIBLE LONG DISTANCE PHONE CALLS THAT MAY HAVE EMANATED FROM PHONE BOOTH OF INTEREST. STRONG POSSIBILITY EXISTS THAT SUBJECT MAY VERY WELL HAVE USED PHONE BOOTH AND THIS MIGHT ACCOUNT FOR ENVELOPE BEING THERE.

Melanson is profuse in his thanks to the FBI's public reading room for its help to him. This record was in that FBI public reading room, too. Once the FBI disclosed anything to me copies were placed there for all to be able to use.

Melanson was no less profuse in his thanks to the FBI and to its public reading room. There he also seems not to have seen a CIA record disclosed to me and in its reading room, too. Thus he has as a key and a sinister CIA operative, a certified no-good with a criminal record seeking public attention, Jules Ricco Kimble, in both the King and the Kennedy assassinations.

Supposedly Kimble was involved in the CIA's paying Ray off. That, no doubt, is why, when Ray got to Portugal, inexpensive as ocean passage to what was then known as Rhodesia was, he was about a hundred dollars short of that fare. That is the only reason he was caught. Rhodesia had no extradition treaty with the United States and Ray could not have been extradited.

In the Kennedy assassination, to quote a CIA summary in its box 57 at the National Archives, a public record, "Jules Ricco Kimble, a self-avowed member of the KKK who also claimed he once worked special assignments for the CIA [claims] that on the day after the death of David Ferrie he drove [one] Helm to Ferrie's apartment. Helm then came out with a satchel full o papers . . ." Kimble has gone to Jim Garrison with this story. The CIA's disclosed records as it had to prepare to respond to what Garrison was saying, disclose that Kimble approached the Domestic Contact Service public office in New Orleans saying "that 'Garrison was trying to connect him with the CIA' but that he did not know why. He added that Garrison 'accused him of having taken some papers from the residence of David Ferrie on the day of David Ferrie's death' . . . All Headquarters checks on Kimble were negative."

There is more that I do not go into, like Kimble also trying to involve Bobby Kennedy in his made-up stories, none of which were true. All these stories excited and impressed Melanson who has him in an important role in both of these books of his, without his having seen the record from which I quote. The same records to be found in the CIA's public reading room in which he says helped him so much.

Nobody in the CIA was about to mislead the Director and have his teeth kicked in the public over such matters. Just as while the CIA disclosed and made use of the Garro de Paz story it was also careful to disclose that "she is nuts."

By the time Melanson staked out his claim to be academe's primary authority on both Jack Kennedy and the King assassination, having profited from my peer review of Spy Saga, about which I had not a word of criticism or complaint from him, by the time he got to the Robert Kennedy assassination he was content to depend on the dependable work of the doctoral candidate, the late Gregory Stone.

That these professional scholars presume that Oswald was the assassin or involved in the assassination protects them from retaliation. It being safe for them because it endorses the basis of the official mythology.

Even when, as with Kurtz, referring back to the Lesar review, he has a shot at hitting JFK going upward from the second floor. That would have required, with the limousine going downhill at the time, that the shots first penetrate the paved surface of the sidewalk, road and the earth before hitting the President.

Traditional scholarship does not taint the assassination books of the professional scholars, as we here see in more detail with Brown and, as we see above, it applies to them all. Even earlier as we saw it also applied to the remaining Stephen Ambroses and his like.

There is not a single book supposedly on the JFK assassination by any professional scholar that is both accurate and scholarly. They disgrace scholarship. They are all conspiracy theorizing, with nothing too insane or already refuted for it not to be included in or become basic in their books.

Brown is merely the most recent illustration of the failures of professional scholars who write books about our political assassinations.

In these failures they do deceive and mislead the people and they do for errant government what errant government cannot do for itself to protect it from its own deceptions of the people and re-writings of our tragic history.

In their failures they also fail themselves and authentic scholarship.

Brown, with perhaps more ego and even less discrimination, is merely the latest of them.

Rather than record our history they desecrate it.