‘It’s Complicated’, JFK Told Swedish Lover in Secret Letter
From The Independent:
A month before marrying Jacqueline Bouvier, the future President was writing amorous notes to another woman.
If there was ever any doubt that John F Kennedy, the slain American President, was a hopeless romantic, if not an out-and-out rake with a foggy grasp of the commitments of marriage
, a newly revealed collection of love letters written in his own hand to a straw-haired Swedish siren will surely put it to rest.True, the then young senator from Massachusetts first met the woman in question, Gunilla von Post, before his marriage to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier – but only one month before. It was the summer of 1953 and the pair – he 36 and she just 21 – were both on holiday on the French Riviera. They danced all night and…
Robert Greenwald Attacks Kennedy Miniseries On History Channel
From the very start of our home video business, we’ve worked with director Robert Greenwald, who has become a sort of Defender of the Faith for progressive politics. It speaks volumes that when Robert takes up a cause, it lands on the front page of the New York Times (story below). I have to say I’m also delighted that Robert has highlighted the problem with much of the History Channel’s programming – it’s not history, it’s entertainment with a focus on ratings at the expense of veracity:
A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency that is being prepared by the History channel does not yet have a cast or a premiere date. Not a frame of footage has been shot. It does, however, have prominent critics who want it brought to a halt.
The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of fact and emphasis. But like a similar controversy over a 2003 television film about Ronald Reagan, the dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself.
The mini-series, called “The Kennedys,” is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show “24” and an outspoken political conservative…
It’s a Conspiracy! No, It’s Not: A Debunking of the Classic Theories
Image by quarkscrew via Creative Commons
The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, so often the purveyor of eviscerating book reviews, for once truly loves something: an all-out mockery of a myriad of conspiracy theories, from 9/11 to Princess Diana, by David Aaronovich, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History:
The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were…
The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald
From Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:
Few events have captured the American imagination more than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The American public and our greatest intellectuals have poured over the evidence over and over again. It nags at national consciousness like a wound that won’t heal because you keep picking at it.
The solution to the problem always lies on the tip of our collective tongue. Of course, a great deal of the evidence is locked up, hidden away in the vaults of the intelligence community. This article will not attempt to shed new light on the assassination.
Much of the information presented here is available elsewhere, and has been repeated ad nauseum. I wish to concentrate on the subject of the man Lee Harvey Oswald, a singularly fascinating figure in American history.
Sitting Now Podcast: Above Top Secret with Jim Marrs
From SittingNow.co.uk:
Our Guest this episode, Jim Marrs
We take a break from the recent onslaught of occult-related episodes, and delve head-first into the world of conspiracy theory with legendary author Jim Marrs. Jim is the author of the New York Times bestseller Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, Above Top Secret, The Sisterhood of the Rose and many more.
This week, we discuss: Did the Nazis ever really go away, Who killed JFK, was Lee Harvey Oswald a Patsy or the lone gunman, and much more.
Joining Ken is SittingNow veteran Jacob ‘JW’ Williams, a man plauged with questions about the Kennedy assassination. One such question, “was Kennedy’s door open?”, is now available for your digestion:
Jacob’s eagle-eye spotted this…
Enjoy!
Annals of Unsolved Crime: The Oswald Mystery
From The Huffington Post:
The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, two generations of self-styled assassination investigators, probably never will be satisfactorily resolved. Each new release of documents from the various bureaucracies involved in the nearly half century old investigation may only deepen the apparent contradictions.
Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest at the Texas Book Depository. So was his palm print. He had also bought the ammunition. His cartridge cases were found near the body of a murdered policeman on…
Digital Forensics Expert: Controversial Lee Harvey Oswald Photo is Not A Fake
MELANIE PLENDA writes in the Union Leader:
Kennedy conspiracy theorists appear to have one less bullet in their arsenal. Hany Farid, a computer science professor and expert in digital forensics at Dartmouth College, spent two months evaluating a photograph of John F. Kennedy shooter Lee Harvey Oswald.
“You can’t really authenticate a photo in all honesty,” Farid said of the image, which shows Oswald holding a Marxist newspaper and a rifle. “But I can say pretty definitively that the things that people thought made the photo a fake, well, those people are wrong. And it doesn’t make them stupid. I was wrong too. But that photo is not the proof they think it is.”
It’s long been the contention of conspiracy theorists that photos of Oswald were doctored as part of an elaborate…
LBJ Hid in Bathroom, Cried After JFK Assassination
According to the book by Steven M. Gillon The Kennedy Assassination — 24 Hours After via huffpo:
It was standard practice for the plane to take off as soon as the commander-in-chief was onboard. Even after McHugh had ordered the pilot to take off, however, “nothing happened.” According to the newly declassified transcript, Mrs. Kennedy was becoming desperate to leave. “Mrs. Kennedy was getting very warm, she had blood all over her hat, her coat…his brains were sticking on her hat. It was dreadful,” McHugh said. She pleaded with him to get the plane off the ground. “Please, let’s leave,” she said. McHugh jumped up and used the phone near the rear compartment to call Captain James Swindal. “Let’s leave,” he said. Swindal responded: “I can’t do it. I have orders to wait.” Not wanting to make a scene in front of Mrs. Kennedy, McHugh rushed to the front of the plane. “Swindal, what on earth is going on?” The pilot told him that “the President wants to remain in this area.”
McHugh, like most members of the Kennedy entourage, did not know that Johnson was onboard. They believed that the new president was on his own plane flying back to Washington. If LBJ was on the plane, McHugh wanted to see for himself. Since he had not seen Johnson in the aisle — and at 6′4″ Johnson would be tough to miss — McHugh assumed that he must then be in the bedroom. When he checked there Johnson was nowhere to be seen. The only place on the plane he had not inspected was the bathroom in the presidential bedroom.
What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. “I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978. “McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee. Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”
CIA Fights To Keeps Its JFK Assassination Files Secret
Scott Shane writes in the New York Times:
Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.
For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.
The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident…
JFK Assassination Extravaganza – Out There Radio: Episode 5 & 6
Out There Radio – Episode 5 & 6: JFK Assassination Extravaganza
Website • iTunes • Direct Download (part 1, part 2) • RSS
The first half of our JFK assassination special features lively discussion about the basic elements of the assassination, as well as an examination of some of the more obvious problems with the official record.
In the second half of our JFK assassination specia we talk about different theories surrounding the identity of the assassin/assassins, as well as possible motives behind the President’s murder.
