The Last Investigation
Gaeton Fonzi
Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1993
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
Peter Dale Scott
University of California Press
London and Berkeley, 1993
With Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, reviewed above by Alex Cox, these books are the best of the post Oliver Stone wave that I am aware of.
Fonzi, early in the JFK assassination field as a journalist in Philadelphia, was hired in 1976 to work for Senator Schweiker’s assassination sub-committee of the Church Committee. The disinformation mills set to work and Fonzi began to work through false trails from Clare Booth Luce, Frank Sturgis, Marita Lorenz, and Mitch Werbell. Then he met Syliva Odio; and from her the anti-Castro Cuban leader of Alpha 66, Antonio Veciana — and from Veciana he heard of the CIA officer Veciana worked with, ‘Maurice Bishop’, identified tentatively as David Attlee Phillips.
He was then hired to work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations — the subject of the second half of the book. He describes the attacks on original chief counsel Richard Sprague — and his own education in bureaucratic politics. For example, quite close to the beginning of the Committee’s existence, when it was still under fire, Fonzi had tracked down and was about to interview George de Morenschild when he committed suicide (or was ‘suicided’). Fonzi comments (p. 193): ‘While de Morenschild may have been one of the most important witnesses in the Kennedy assassination investigation, in Washington his death was viewed not as a tremendous setback for the investigation, but as a publicity break that might help the Assassination Committee survive.’
Fonzi does for the HSCA investigation what David Lifton did, for me, with the Warren Commission. Lifton’s revelation was the lawyer’s notion that the ‘best evidence’ is the body and the wounds upon it. These are facts: what people think they saw or heard is inherently, and demonstrably, unreliable. Hence the centrality of the wounds on the body in the legal mind — and hence, in Lifton’s view, the centrality to the assassination of the same ‘best evidence’.
For Fonzi the moment of illumination was the realisation that while he thought the HSCA was engaged in investigating the assassination, the investigation’s new boss, Robert Blakey, a more sophisticated player of the bureaucratic game, actually saw his job as writing a report and delivering it on time. ‘Those people out there thought we were investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. We were planning to get out a report.’ (p. 223) (And, while he was at it, Blakey had a report prepared which corresponded with his beliefs about the assassination and the nature of organised crime.)
At p. 261 the section on the House Select Committee ends, and from there until the end of the book it’s chiefly the continued hunt for evidence about David Attlee Phillips. Fonzi concludes that Phillips was involved in the assassination of John Kennedy — but while he has evidence that Phillips was involved in the circulation of disinformation about the killing after the fact, oddly enough, of evidence that Phillips was involved in the actual conspiracy there is not a word.
Outlined like this it may not sound much, but this is a really good book, one of the best three or four written about the assassination — as well as being a fascinating account of the business of trying to research the most heavily defended and disinformation-laden story since the war.
The Scott book is much harder to write about. Initially it felt like classic P.D. Scott, intricate trails cut through the jungle of minutiae (with a parallel text in the wonderful footnotes). Then it started to get hard work — the narrative thread seemed to fizzle out. I began reading a few pages, then putting it down again to do something else and give my brain a rest. (Daniel Brandt called it ‘exhausting’ in Namebase Newsline no. 4). It was only when I’d worked my way through the thing for a second time that it dawned on me that I had probably been mis-reading Scott’s intentions. My mistake was in approaching this as if it was simply a book about the assassination. It is that, of course, but what Scott has actually done is use the assassination to illustrate his concept of deep politics.
Of which he says this: ‘I used to summarize [my early researches into the Kennedy assassination] collectively as the investigation of parapolitics, which I defined (with the CIA in mind), as “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.” This term referred chiefly, but not exclusively, to the world of intelligence agencies and similar organizations, where secrecy and covert operations were adopted as a matter of deliberate policy.
‘I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional to describe the deeper irrational movements which culminated collectively in the murder of the President: it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture’s rational surface.
‘Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of deep politics, all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than explored.’ (pp. 67) (Emphasis added.)
And in the end, what does it give you?
‘The President was murdered by a coalition of forces inside and outside government, of the type described in this book. In short, Kennedy was killed by the deep political system.
To understand the assassination, analysis, in the sense of isolating constituent agents, will not be enough; it must be complemented by synthesis, the relating of apparently separate elements in a coherent whole….. the keys to a credible model for what happened, through the murders and also the cover-up, is not to think of it as an externalized conspiratorial disruption of our deep political system (analgous to the invasion of an otherwise healthy body by an external germ or virus to be isolated). It is to think of it as a synergetic performance by internal ingredients of that deep political system itself.’
Which sounds OK at first (despite the appearance of the dreaded ‘synergetic’) but begins to look problematic on examination. In the first place, Scott is almost presenting ‘externalized conspiratorial disruption’ and ‘the deep political system itself’ as the only alternatives. Manifestly there are non deep politics models which are not ‘externalized conspiratorial disruption’. Secondly, to talk of ‘internal ingredients of the deep political system itself’ leads to the obvious question, OK, which ‘ingredients’? This, in turn leads back to basic ‘who dunnit?’ type questions, where people do consciously, rationally, make decision to do things — back to parapolitics, in short. So what has the shift to ‘deep politics’ achieved? Or is it that ‘deep politics’ is actually a means of giving up asking the questions ‘Who? When? Why? Where? and How?’ It’s almost as if Scott believes that simply describing in enough detail the ‘deep politics’ around the event would show the ‘synergetic performance’. But it won’t.
About this stuff I’m still not sure. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever Scott’s wider intentions, taken slowly, Deep Politics is also a collection of dense, fascinating bits and pieces from the Scott canon; Scott on JFK and Vietnam (politely devastating Noam Chomsky); Scott on Ruby, narcotics, Army Intelligence, the Great Southwest Corporation and so forth. If it’s not the massive, synthesising masterpiece I was hoping for it’s still a wonderful piece of work.