UK readers should note that remaindered around September was a big collection of essays (500 plus pages) by the American writer Ron Rosenbaum, Travels with Dr Death (Papermack, 1999). This includes essays on JFK’s death and the assassination research community; the death of Mary Meyer; Watergate; the secret society Skull and Bones; and the CIA. … Read more
A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster Ted Morgan New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95 Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union Scott Lucas Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45 Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 Nick Cullather Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95 … Read more
Searchlight again In the Daniel Brandt essay in this issue there is a section on the scandal in the United States resulting from the discovery that the Jewish organisation, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has been found to be collecting data on hundreds of political groups, both right and left, and trading data with agencies of … Read more
Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains … Read more
Daniel Ellsberg New York: Viking, 2003 Colin Challen MP The timely publication of Ellsberg’s memoir shows that from the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident to the Arabian Gulf in 2003, little seems to have changed in the United States’ approach to starting war. Ellsberg’s account of secret White House activity in the wake of the Tonkin … Read more
Some recent JFK literature In front of me is a copy of Guth and Wrone’s The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography 1983-1979 (1980), nearly 450 pages, running to some 5,134 entries covering books, magazine articles, records, TV programmes, and news items from both the New York Times and the … Read more
Francis Beckett and David Hencke London: Constable, 2009, h/b, £18.99 This is quite interesting and impressive; but with a strange spin. There is a lot of (to me) new detail on the impact of the event on the Labour Party and trade unions, on money given to the NUM from other unions and on attempts … Read more
This arrived from David Guyatt, prefaced by the following message: ‘Robin: This is being published on a couple of Internet sites shortly. I’ve given up trying to sell it or get any responsible journo/editor to carry my work forward. They all have chickened out, mostly without an explanation or even a courtesy call/reply. Fuck ’em … Read more
Conjuring Hitler: How the Western Elite Incubated Nazism – 1900-38 Guido Preparata US: University of Michigan Press, 2005; h/b, $90.00; p/b $28.95 UK: Pluto Press, 2005; h/b £60.00; p/b £17.99 I would like to introduce a recently published book that has been overlooked. Guido Preparata’s Conjuring Hitler: How the Western Elite Incubated Nazism-1900-38 reinterprets … Read more
Responsibilities, old boy The Big Breach Richard Tomlinson Cutting Edge, Edinburgh, 2000, £9.99 I found it hard to ‘see’ this because so much of its contents have been published in the media. There have been some changes – names altered – since the newspaper versions; and I am told that the original hardback version … Read more
