Still hazy after all these years

👤 Robin Ramsay  

The assassinations of the sixties

JFK

Farewell America

On the site of The Coalition On Political Assassinations(1) is a very interesting essay by William Turner, ‘RFK, Charles de Gaulle and the Farewell America plot’, about the events leading up to the publication of the book Farewell America about the Kennedy assassination.(2) This may be marginalia but it is interesting marginalia nonetheless. Notably, former FBI agent Turner tells us:

  • that the book may have resulted from contact between the Garrison inquiry and the KGB. Working for New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, Turner wondered what the Soviets knew about Oswald and sent someone to contact the KGB in Mexico City. (Innocent days, eh? In the midst of the most sensitive inquiry imaginable into the darkest corners of the US military-industrial-complex, they decide to contact the KGB?)The KGB officer there, Kostikov – yes, the man who met Oswald in the Soviet embassy – said that it would not be possible to give Garrison’s inquiry the KGB file on Oswald but hinted that something might turn up from an unexpected quarter. Turner suspects that Farewell America was that something; that although the book was put together by French intelligence people, it was the contact with Kostikov which led to it.
  • The pseudonymous writer of the book was Thomas Buchanan, author of the 1964 Who Killed Kennedy?
  • Although Robert Kennedy’s public line was to support the Warren Commission verdict, privately he got a friend, Patrick Moynihan, later a senator, to make some inquiries about the event (which could amount to what, realistically?), some of which material found its way into the book.

So we may have had the French and Soviet secret states and the Kennedy network working discreetly together; at any rate in contact.

Turner makes much of the insider information in Farewell America. Is there that much? I remember being disappointed that after all the hype about the book, its author(s) didn’t know much more than I did about the actual shooting. I skimmed through it on-line while writing this piece (my copy was loaned to a JFK buff about 20 years ago and never returned). While it is a very good account of the opposition to Kennedy, and a quite striking essay on America of the period, and on Kennedy’s years in office, there is no evidence of real, what we might loosely call ‘inside’ knowledge of the assassination. The book hypothesises a committee which organised the killing and incorporates some of the research which had been done at that time into the assassination. It suggests a local Mafia-oil-right wing conspiracy, hints at H. L. Hunt’s involvement and asserts that the Minutemen, a right-wing group of the period, and the Dallas police, were involved – but offers no evidence. The author(s) affect an air of inside knowledge but offer only assertion.

LBJ’s role

Meanwhile, on John Simkin’s excellent on-line forum there is a very good discussion of LBJ (conspicuously missing from Farewell America) and his possible role in the assassination, chiefly by Simkin, with contributions by other members of the forum.(3) Related to which is a typically careful look by Larry Hancock (4) at part of the LBJ story, the claim by Billy Sol Estes that he has Cliff Carter, one of LBJ’s aides, on tape admitting his and LBJ’s involvement in a number of killings, including JFK’s. Hancock reports two witnesses who claim to have heard the tapes of the conversation made by Estes and who confirm, in general terms, that they contain what Estes says they do.(5)

Marcello’s ‘confession’

Elsewhere we learn of a ‘confession’ by Mafia boss, the late Carlos Marcello, that he had Kennedy killed. According to reports of the new book by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, declassified FBI files contain reports of a confession by Marcello after the FBI planted someone on him in prison. Waldron claims the FBI files show

‘…for the first time Louisiana Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello’s clear confession to ordering JFK’s assassination. Marcello’s criminal empire ranged from Dallas to Memphis, and previously secret files at the National Archives show that he confessed in 1985 to an FBI informant ruled credible by a federal judge, as part of a secret FBI undercover sting operation named CAMTEX. Exposed here for the first time, CAMTEX also yielded Marcello’s admission that he’d met Lee Harvey Oswald and set Jack Ruby up in business in Dallas. The operation also generated hundreds of hours of heretofore secret prison audio tapes of Marcello discussing his crimes, recorded using the FBI informant’s bugged transistor radio. Yet the FBI and Justice Department withheld most of that information from the public and Congress for years, until its revelation in this book.’ (6)

But how far should we take seriously information acquired from informants in prison? And Marcello didn’t ‘confess’; he boasted of having it done, as have other Mafia figures.

This ‘confession’ is merely a factor in one of the puzzles: how many assassination plots were there? Before he died former CIA officer and Watergate ‘plumber’, E. Howard Hunt, seemed to be talking of there being several plots;(7) and there are fragments of apparent advance information – for example: Milteer, Cheramie, Martino, maybe even Marita Lorenz’s apparently improbable story – suggesting there was more than one. This seems to be taking us into the territory parodied in the first volume of Robert Shea and the late Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus Trilogy, in which rival gangs of shooters argued over firing rights from the grassy knoll;(8) but recently I heard a whisper, allegedly sourced to a major Mafia figure, that to muddy any investigative waters there were three teams working independently to kill Kennedy, none of which knew about the other two. Whether or not the account of the source of this is true, it is an hypothesis which immediately explains a good deal of the evidence of apparently conflicting plots.

RFK

Film actor Robert Vaughn, who has a PhD in American history,(9) has endorsed the claims made by Peter Evans in his 2004 book Nemesis, that Aristotle Onassis had a role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In Vaughn’s recent memoir, A Fortunate Life, he describes meeting the photographer Hélène Gaillet in 2007 and hearing her repeat what she had told Evans: that Onassis had told her that he had financed the assassination.(10) This is proof of nothing but it is striking.

The attempt on George Wallace

Christopher Ketcham has re-examined the evidence suggesting that the shooter of Governor George Wallace, Arthur Bremer, was…..what? Some kind of stooge/patsy being manipulated for the Nixon White House? And there is a lot of evidence, more than enough to have justified as much interest as in the other killings. Given his politics, it is hardly surprising that left-liberals, who make up most of the assassination research community, have not been interested in the Wallace case. But it striking that Wallace’s own supporters have generated so little noise. Ketcham concludes:

‘George Wallace’s coalition of conservative Southern voters ushered in the era of the Republican Southern Strategy, which has defined the parameters of victory for the GOP for over a quarter-century. The attempted assassination of Wallace and the end of his 1972 campaign allowed Nixon to harvest a franchise that arguably came to fruition outside the traditional Democratic Party by the demagoguery and leadership – however atavistic and ugly – of George Wallace. Without Wallace and the bullets that stopped him, there would be no GOP as we know it today. That is Wallace’s legacy.’(11)

Notes

  1. <www.politicalassassinations.com/>
  2. The book is on-line at <www.jfk-online.com/farewell00.html>
  3. <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t2310.html>
    One of the central questions, the reliability of the identification of Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace’s fingerprint as the one found on the Texas Book Depository’s 6th floor, is discussed at some length at <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4966>.
  4. Author of Someone Would Have Talked, reviewed in Lobster 53.
  5. <http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=2321>
  6. <www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/gossip/liz/jfk_assassination_confession_147381.htm> This long quote is from author Waldron at <www.buzzflash.com/articles/node/7136> For more on this thesis see <www.commondreams.org/views06/1019-21.htm>Waldron’s book is methodically rubbished by Jim Di Eugenio at <www.ctka.net/2009/legacy_secrecy.html>. I do not share DiEugenio’s interest in Jim Garrison but he certainly knows whereof he writes.
  7. ‘The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt’ in Rolling Stone, 5 April 2007 <www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13893143/the_last_confessions_of_e_howard_hunt>/
  8. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy> The first volume is clever and amusing but the other two volumes I found tedious.
  9. His PhD thesis on the McCarthy era in Hollywood was published as Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting.
  10. <www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1111444/I-know-Bobby-Kennedys-murder-actor-friend-Robert-Vaughn.html>
  11. <www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=390> Little known on this side of the Atlantic, Ketcham is very good indeed. Check out his website <christopherketcham.com>.

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