Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President Kennedy
E. Martin Schotz
Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1996
Distributed in the UK by Plough Publishing House (at 01580 883344), £15.50
This is a very odd book. It is beautifully printed, bound and laid-out – a pleasure to handle. Unfortunately the content doesn’t match the package. It’s a 25-page essay by Schotz with 250 pages of vaguely supportive documentation. Schotz is stuck in a kind of time-warp. Almost nothing on the case after 1967 has made it into Schotz’s little capsule. So we are given three 1966 essays by Vincent Salandria attacking the Warren Commission which were fine pieces of work in 1966, but who cares now? We also get the entire text of Kennedy’s famous speech at the American University in June 1963, and the entire text of a speech given by Fidel Castro the day after the shooting. Fidel’s speech is rather striking: 24 hours after the shooting he – or his intelligence people – had already spotted the attempts in the immediate aftermath to portray Oswald as pro-Soviet and pro-Castro. We get letters from Kruschev to Castro; we get the text of 1961 talks between John J. McCloy and Valerian Zorin, of the USSR. In other words, Schotz has got a thesis: he thinks it’s is obvious who killed Kennedy and why. It was about the Cold War and Cuba; and he was killed by the CIA. (Though just in case he’s wrong about that he states on p. 2 that ‘the term “CIA” as used here signifies the entire web of U.S. military intelligence agencies.’! He then proceeds to use the term in both senses……)
There is one useful section, in which he details the refusal of some of the U.S. left – The Nation, I.F. Stone, Chomsky – to take the assassination on board. So for those few pages, and the text of Castro’s speech – thanks. The rest of it, including the author’s pop-psych attempts to explain the ‘public denial’ bit of the subtitle, is a waste of time, effort and money, There might be a book, at any rate a decent essay, to written along the lines suggested by the material Schotz has assembled – pity he didn’t write it.