Conference Speakers
[intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”900″ size=”thumbnail” title=”aguilar” class=”floatleft”] Gary Aguilar, M.D.:An ophthalmologist who has lectured and written extensively on the JFK assassination. He is considered a leading authority on the medical evidence, and is one of only a handful of non-government experts ever given access to the JFK autopsy photos and x-rays. AARC Board member.[/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”912″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Russ Baker: A prize-winning investigative journalist, is the founder of WhoWhatWhy.org, a nonprofit news site that has covered the JFK story extensively. He is also author of the bestseller “Family of Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years”, which contains five chapters of new material related to George H.W. Bush’s secret service as a Texas-based CIA operative in 1963, as well as other aspects of the Kennedy assassination. He looked extensively at the Warren Commission, including in particular its staffing and its handling of “prize witness” George de Mohrenschildt, an old friend of Bush’s.[/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column][intense_image image=”905″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Joseph Backes: A JFK assassination researcher since the 1990’s who has written extensively about the activities of the Assassination Records Review Board. He has also written reviews of documents the ARRB released and is now compiling an inventory of documents that continue to be withheld. Backes runs a blog “Justice For Kennedy: A Blog About The JFK Assassination And Other Political Crimes.”[/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”913″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Prof. G. Robert Blakey, J.D.: An attorney and law professor. Special Attorney in the Justice Department under Robert Kennedy. Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) from 1977 to 1979.
[/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”1095″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Malcolm Blunt: Malcolm Blunt is known in the assassination research community for his encyclopedic knowledge of the JFK records held at the National Archives II in College Park, MD.
[/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”914″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Rex Bradford: Has pioneered the digitization and online access to JFK records for 15 years. Approximately 1 million pages of AARC records, as well as documents from other sources, are available online due to his efforts. He is also the proprietor of the History Matters web site and President of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Rex has written and spoken extensively on the assassination and its larger political context. He is Vice President and a member of the Board of the AARC.
[/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”955″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Brenda Brody: Brenda Brody has spent most of her business career working for major media companies. She became involved in JFK assassination research shortly after President Kennedy was shot. She has conducted meaningful and important research on William Pawley’s history, and, using original historical records, she has also made an extensive study of the political, economic, and military history of the Bay of Pigs. She has also recently assisted Dr. Randolph Robertson’s mathematical study and synchronization of the acoustic evidence from Dealey Plaza with the Zapruder film, and the visible reactions of eyewitnesses as recorded on photographs and films. Brenda Brody is a member of the Board of Directors of the AARC. [/intense_column] [/intense_row] [intense_row] [intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”988″ size=”thumbnail” class=”floatleft”] Alan Dale: will introduce speakers and moderate panels at the conference. He is the host of JFK Lancer: Conversations, an on-line interview program featuring in-depth discussions with prominent authors, historical researchers, and notable personalities associated with the study of President Kennedy’s assassination.
He is a full-time professional jazz musician and band leader, a lifetime student of American history whose parents were active as supporters and volunteers in the political campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy. He is the administrator of jfkessentials.com
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Jim DiEugenio: Jim DiEugenio is an educator, author, founder of Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy Assassination [CTKA]. He is the author of “Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, ” and “Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination.” DiEugenio is co-Editor of the journal “Probe” (1993-2000) which focused on the releases of the ARRB and new developments in the King and RFK cases. He has an MA in Contemporary American History from California State University Northridge.
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Marie Fonzi, Ed.D: Dr. Marie Fonzi, widow of Gaeton Fonzi, continues to pursue his passion to uncover the truth about the JFK assassination. She located and made available the famous 1966 Fonzi/Specter interview tapes and transcripts which can now be viewed on the Mary Ferrell Website. She wrote the Preface for the 2013 edition of Gaeton’s“The Last Investigation,” required reading for students of the assassination which tells of our Government’s failure to conduct the full and complete investigation it promised. His book is both a compelling postmortem on the House Select Committee on Assassinations and a riveting account of Fonzi’s pursuit of leads implicating CIA officers. On the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Antonio Veciana, former leader of Alpha 66, acknowledged in a letter to Dr. Fonzi what Gaeton had long believed: that the CIA agent Veciana knew as Maurice Bishop, whom he saw in September of 1963 with Lee Harvey Oswald, was indeed David Atlee Phillips, CIA Chief of the Western Hemisphere. Dr. Fonzi, a lifetime educator, currently teaches a course on the JFK assassination.
Frazier will also share his recollections of Oswald the person he remembers as being very intelligent and well-read, and who was very fond of children, as children were of him.
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Robert Groden: Author of several books on the JFK assassination. Served as photographic consultant for the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations and as a consultant on the film “JFK.” Groden made history when, on March 6, 1975, he and Dick Gregory appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s ABC late-night TV program “Good Night America” and showed the Zapruder film of the assassination to a mass audience for the first time.
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Eric Hamburg, J.D.: Eric Hamburg is a writer, attorney and film producer in Los Angeles. He is the director of the 2009 documentary film PREVENTING GENOCIDE, featuring interviews with Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, William Perry and many others. He is also a former aide to Senator John Kerry, and was an adviser to the Kerry presidential campaign in 2004. He is co-author of the 2013 book, “Give Peace A Chance: Preventing Mass Violence”. His film credits include “ANY GIVEN SUNDAY,” “NIXON,” and a TV documentary on Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which was shown in 1998 on TBS and on CNN Perspectives. Mr. Hamburg is the author of the book “JFK, Nixon, Oliver Stone and Me”, published by Public Affairs Books in 2002. Mr. Hamburg is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and of the University Of San Francisco School Of Law. He holds a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree and is a member of the California State Bar Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Pacific Council on International Policy.
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Larry Hancock: A leading historian-researcher in the JFK assassination. He co-authored, with Connie Kritzberg, “November Patriots” and is author of the acclaimed “Someone Would Have Talked”, now in its third, 2010 edition. Larry has a new book “NEXUS: Political Assassinations and the CIA” that includes new information and analysis on “The CIA and Extreme Deniability”, “The Culture of the Agency”, and “Spy Games in Mexico City.”
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Dan Hardway, J.D.: An attorney in private practice and former researcher for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977-1978. Member of the Board of the AARC.
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Mal Hyman: Is recognized as an international authority on the JFK assassination and has just completed a book on the subject. He has lectured and written about Nov. 22, 1963, throughout the U.S., and his courses at Coker College are oversubscribed each year.
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David E. Kaiser, Ph.D: An American historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics, from European warfare to American League baseball. He was a professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College from 1990 until 2012 and has also taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams College (2006-7 and 2012-13), and Harvard University. His 2008 book, “The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” does not dispute the official findings that Oswald was the lone shooter, but argues that the assassination was carried out by leading organized crime figures as revenge for the attempts made by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to persecute Mafia leaders. His conference topic is “Further Down the Road to Dallas.”
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William E. Kelly: An Independent researcher; founder, Committee for an Open Archive; co-founder, Coalition on Political Assassinations. Bill’s current focus includes the November 22nd Air Force One cockpit tapes which have never been fully released, and which he believes “are the black box of the Kennedy assassination” This will be the subject of his conference presentation.
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Peter Kornbluh: Senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington in its Chile Documentation Project. He is co-author of the forthcoming book “Back Channel To Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” which challenges the conventional wisdom of perpetual hostility between the United States and Cuba and chronicles the largely untold history of bilateral efforts toward rapprochement and reconciliation between JFK and Fidel Castro.
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Andrew Kreig, M.S.L., J.D.: An investigative reporter, attorney, and editor of the non-partisan Justice Integrity Project. His latest book, “Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters,” has an introduction by Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, who will also be presenting at our conference. He holds degrees from Yale Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and Cornell University, and is AARC’s development and communications director for outreach. Author of a “Readers Guide” to key JFK-assassination-related books, films, events and organizations, he focuses on the importance of the assassination to today’s government and politics.
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Peter Kuznick Ph.D.: Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, is author of “Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists As Political Activists in 1930s America” (University of Chicago Press), co-author with Akira Kimura of “Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives” (Horitsu Bunkasha, 2010), co-author with Yuki Tanaka of Genpatsu to hiroshima – genshiryoku heiwa riyo no shinso (“Nuclear Power and Hiroshima: The Truth Behind the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power” (Iwanami, 2011), and co-editor with James Gilbert of “Rethinking Cold War Culture” (Smithsonian Institution Press). A New York native, he received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1984. He was active in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and remains active in antiwar and nuclear abolition efforts. His current projects include a book on scientists and the Vietnam War. He and Oliver Stone co-authored the 10 part Showtime documentary film series and book, both titled The Untold History of the United States. He has begun his fourth three-year term as Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
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James H. “Jim” Lesar, J.D.: A Freedom of Information Act attorney, Washington, D.C.; President, Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), a nonprofit organization that obtains, preserves, and disseminates information on political assassinations, especially the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On behalf of the AARC, he testified before three Congressional committees in support of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was unanimously passed by Congress and signed into law. He has litigated over 200 FOIA cases in federal district and appellate courts setting several important precedents.
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Ed Lopez, J.D.: is the General Counsel for the Rochester New York City School District. From 1977 to 1979 he served as Researcher/Investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations where he researched the “Pro-Cuban” issue and co-researched with Dan Hardway the “Oswald Mexico City” issue, a report that was only recently declassified. Lopez interviewed over 100 witnesses, and analyzed numerous Top Secret documents. In connection with his official duties he traveled to Cuba and interviewed President Fidel Castro.
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David Mantik, M.D. Ph.D: Mantik earned a PhD in physics at the University of Wisconsin and a postdoctoral fellowship in biophysics at Stanford, followed by a tenure-track physics post at the University of Michigan. He earned his MD at Michigan. He is board certified in radiation oncology at USC He joined the faculty at Loma Linda and supervised the residency training program.
Over the past twenty years, he has made nine visits to the National Archives in order to view, and perform measurements on, the JFK autopsy X-rays, the autopsy photographs, JFK’s clothing and the ballistic evidence.
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Joan Mellen, Ph.D: Is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of twenty-two books including several that deal directly or indirectly with the JFK assassination: “A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History” , “Our Man in Haiti: George de Mohrenschildt and the CIA in the Nightmare Republic”, “A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History”, “The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro.”
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Jefferson Morley: Author and former Washington Post reporter, is the moderator of JFK Facts and plaintiff in the lawsuit, Morley v. CIA, seeking release of long-secret JFK records. Morley is a 25-year veteran of Washington journalism who has worked as an editor and/or journalist at The New Republic, The Nation, and Spin Magazine, before going to the Washington Post in 1992. He has written extensively about the Central Intelligence Agency, George H.W. Bush, Central American death squads and the Iran-contra affair. His reporting has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, Readers Digest, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and Salon, among others. His book “Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA” was published in 2007. Morley has taken a keen interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and is the author of several articles on the subject. He is the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the CIA, demanding the release of records pertaining to CIA officer George Joannides who was called out of retirement in the 1970s to serve as liaison with the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Unknown to the HSCA, Joannides had in 1963 been the case officer for the Student Revolutionary Directorate, the Cuban exile group with whom Lee Harvey Oswald had multiple interactions in New Orleans.
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John M. Newman, Ph.D: Retired Major, U.S. Army. Also worked in US Army Intelligence from 1974-1994; served as Assistant to the Director, National Security Agency, from 1988-1990; US Army Attaché in China, 1990-1992. On the academic front he was a Professor, University of Maryland, 1981-1994; Honors Professor, University of Maryland, 1994-2013; Adjunct Professor, James Madison University, 2013-present. His books include “JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power” and “Oswald and the CIA.” Newman joined the Board of Directors of the AARC in 2014.
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Lisa Pease: Lisa Pease has been a longtime researcher on the assassinations of the sixties and the broader Cold War context in which these took place. She has appeared on television and radio and has had numerous articles in publications that include Salon and the Los Angeles Times. She co-edited an anthology of essays (which include several of her own pieces) called “The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X”.
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Jerry Policoff: Has been an active member of the JFK assassination research community since 1966 when he was a 19-year-old college student. He made his living in broadcast advertising sales and sales management for more than 40 years while researching and writing about the JFK assassination in his spare time. He has specialized in the role of the media in reporting on the various political assassinations. He has been published in three book anthologies, The New York Times, The Washington Star, New Times (for whom he covered the House Select Committee on Assassinations, breaking several exclusive news stories), The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Gallery Magazine, The Realist and others. He has appeared in a documentary on the subject and on several television news programs, including the MacNeil Lehrer Report as a journalist for New Times. He was the first to break the story – in New Times — that acoustics analysis performed for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) determined that shots had been fired from the front, establishing at least two gunmen and a conspiracy. Policoff is a member of the Board of Directors of the AARC, and also serves as its Executive Director.
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Grover B. Proctor Ph.D: A retired university Dean and Co-Founder of two colleges in P.R. China, Dr. Proctor began his research in the JFK assassination in 1974. Since that time, he has published extensively, lectured widely, and has frequently been consulted by print and broadcast media. While most of his work comprises analysis and interpretation of the assassination research phenomenon, he broke new ground in the investigation in the early 1980’s with his work on Lee Oswald’s attempt to make a telephone call from the Dallas jail to John Hurt, a former military counterintelligence agent in Raleigh, N.C. His professional expertise is in statistical analysis and research methodology, which extends in many practical areas of Social Science and Business/Marketing research.
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Randolph H. Robertson, M.D.: Has been interested in the assassination for nearly 25 years. He holds B.S. and M.S and M.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is a Board certified Diagnostic radiologist and the only one outside governmental review panels to have been given permission via the Kennedy family to see the original autopsy materials held at the National Archives. He has testified before the House of Representatives Legislation and National Security Subcommittee on Government Operations on the Effectiveness of the President John F. Kennedy Record Collections Act of 1992 in November 1993 in Washington DC. He will be presenting at this conference on his synchronization of the Zapruder film and the Dallas Police Department DictaBelt that was the subject of the HSCA acoustics-based determination that shots had been fired from both the front and from the rear in Dealey Plaza on November 22, Between 1957 and 1961. Robertson is a member of the Board of Directors of the AARC.
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Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D: A former Canadian diplomat, and retired English professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Between 1957 and 1961 he served with the Canadian diplomatic service. He is an active researcher into “Deep Politics,” a term he coined in rejecting the “conspiracy theory” label. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994. Scott’s published political books include: “Deep Politics and the Death of JFK”; “Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Cuba, and Mexico; Crime and Cover-Up,” “The War Conspiracy; The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam”, “Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America” and “The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era.”
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Bill Simpich, J.D.: Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. The main areas of his law practice are government misconduct and toxic tort violations. He also writes for publications such as Truthout, Counterpunch and OpedNews. Simpich considers the assassination cases to be a poorly understood area of civil rights violations. Simpich is the author of the book “State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald,” which is available on line at no charge from the Mary Ferrell Foundation (donations are accepted).
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Pat Speer: Attended California State University, Northridge, and afterwards settled into a career in the entertainment industry. In 2003, he began studying the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.He has presented at a number of assassination-related conferences on various subjects including the medical evidence. On his website, patspeer.com, and in thousands of posts found online, primarily on the JFK Assassination section of The Education Forum, where he serves as moderator, Speer discusses a number of aspects beyond the medical evidence. Among the topics of discussion are the eyewitness evidence, the paraffin cast of Oswald’s cheek, and the paper bag purportedly used by Oswald to transport his rifle into the building.
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Oliver Stone: The Academy Award winning film director directed the landmark film “JFK” (8 Academy Award nominations and 4 Golden Globe nominations). The film was responsible for the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 which directed the National Archives to collect all known records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and required public disclosure in full no later than October 26, 2017. CIA resistance to conforming to the provisions of the Act and failure of the National Archives to enforce the Act, and what to do about it are major topics of discussion at this conference.
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Anthony Summers: A former senior BBC journalist, is the author of nine major non-fiction books. His investigative work has ranged from the fate of the last Russian Tsar in 1918 to Britain’s Profumo sex/spy scandal, to the John F. Kennedy assassination, to the September 9/11 attacks. He has written biographies of Marilyn Monroe, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Frank Sinatra. His book on the Kennedy assassination, originally published in 1980, has been updated several times – most recently in 2013 – with the title of “Not In Your Lifetime.” The New York Times deemed it ‘important’, the Los Angeles Times ‘an awesome work’, the Boston Globe ‘the closest we have to a definitive work on the events of Dallas.’
Summers was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History with his book, with co-author Robbyn Swan, on the 9/11 attacks. He is the only two-time winner of the British Crime Writers’ Association top award for crime non-fiction – once for his book on Dallas. He is a Fellow of the Historical Society of University College Dublin. He lives in Ireland.
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David Talbot is the author the New York Times bestseller, “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” which explored Robert Kennedy’s search for the truth about the assassination of JFK. His forthcoming book, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, JFK and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” will examine Dulles’s central role in the assassination of President Kennedy and its coverup. Talbot is the founder and former editor-in-chief of the pioneering web publication, Salon, and a former senior editor of Mother Jones magazine.
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Donald B. Thomas, Ph.D: Received his doctorate from the College of Agriculture at the University of Missouri. He held post-doctoral research appointments at the University of Arizona and the University of Nebraska and is currently a senior scientist with the United States federal government and is on the graduate faculty at the University of Texas. He is a former President of the Coleopterists Society and presently serves as a subject editor for the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. Thomas is the author or co-author of more than one hundred scientific journal articles, book chapters and books. His 2001 article in the journal Science & Justice, “The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited” led to publication of “Hear No Evil” a book that places the acoustical evidence in a larger context. Don has also made a study of the shooting of Officer J.D. Tippet, allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald. Don is a member of the Board of Directors of the AARC.
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Ernst Titovets, M.D., Ph.D: Since 2005 Titovets has been Head of the Scientific Research Group, National Research and Clinical Center for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Minsk, Belarus. He held several other prestigious posts prior to that. He also became Lee Harvey Oswald’s closest and only English-speaking friend when Oswald lived in Minsk, then part of the Soviet Union, from 1959-1962. “Erich [Ernst Titovets]…is my oldest existing acquaintance…a friend of mine who speaks English very well…” as Oswald would put it in his Historic Diary. In his book Oswald: Russian Episode Ernst Titovets investigates the Russian period of life and activity of Lee Harvey Oswald, an alleged assassin of JFK. The book is based mainly on the author’s first-hand experience of knowing Oswald. It also includes the author’s interviews with many Russians who met Oswald, there are documents with Oswald’s longhand never published before, unique transcripts of the audio recordings of Oswald and Titovets reading stories, enacting plays, giving mock interviews to one another. The book presents a culmination of the Author’s painstaking research conducted over many years to reveal the true character of Oswald, a close-up of this still largely misunderstood man. Note: Titovets’ book is out of print, but organizers are attempting to get it re-printed in time for the conference. Titovets lives in Minsk and we are flying him in for this event.
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[intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”1077″ size=”thumbnail” title=”aguilar” class=”floatleft”]Antonio Veciana: We owe a major debt to the late Senate and House investigator Gaeton Fonzi for what we now know about Antonio Veciana and his CIA contact Maurice Bishop, and the meeting he attended when Bishop appeared in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald. Veciana was the founder of the anti-Castro organization known as Alpha 66, and was himself involved in two CIA assassination attempts on Cuban President Fidel Castro. He calls Fonzi’s book, “The Last Investigation” the “best book that has been written” about the Kennedy Assassination, and on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination on November 22nd, 1963 he confirmed to Gaeton’s widow, Marie, the major premise of Gaeton’s book: That Maurice Bishop was in fact the person he also knew as David Atlee Phillips, the high-ranking CIA official in charge of all CIA operations in the Western hemisphere.[/intense_column]
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[intense_column size=”12″ ][intense_image image=”1023″ size=”thumbnail” title=”aguilar” class=”floatleft”]Lamar Waldron: For his books “Legacy of Secrecy” (updated 2009) and “Ultimate Sacrifice” (updated 2006), Variety called Waldron “the ultimate JFK historian,” while the Chicago Tribune named him “one of the best investigative journalists in the United States” for his book “Watergate: The Hidden History–Nixon, the Mafia, and the CIA.” His most recent book, “The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination,” was cited by the Boston Globe, NBC News, the BBC, MSNBC, the New York Post, the Guardian, and UPI. His work was the subject of two Discovery Channel specials produced by NBC News, and he has also appeared numerous times on CNN, Fox News, and the History Channel.[/intense_column]
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Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., L.L.B., J.D.: A prominent forensic pathologist who has consulted on numerous high profile cases and has been a long-term and passionate critic of the JFK autopsy and of the lone assassin findings of the Warren Commission. He is past president of both the American Academy of Forensic Science and the American College of Legal Medicine, and currently heads the board of trustees of the American Board of Legal Medicine. He served in Pittsburgh, Pa. at various times as County Commissioner, Allegheny County Coroner & Medical Examiner. High-profile cases he has worked on include Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Brian Jones, The Symbionese Liberation Army shootout, John F. Kennedy, The Legionnaires’ Disease panic, Elvis Presley, Jon Benét Ramsey, Dr. Herman Tarnower (the Scarsdale diet guru), Danielle van Dam, Sunny von Bülow, the Branch Davidian incident, Vincent Foster, Laci Peterson and most recently Daniel and Anna Nicole Smith. During his career, Wecht performed more than 14,000 autopsies. He is a clinical professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of law at Duquesne University. He served on the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, Forensic Pathology Panel, and he was a consultant for the 1991 film JFK. In 1982 he was the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate opposing John Heinz. Wecht fiercely contests the official government conclusion that a single bullet caused seven non-fatal wounds to JFK and Governor Connally and emerged in nearly pristine condition. In the fall of 2000, the Duquesne University School of Law established the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law. The Wecht Institute is a co-sponsor of this conference. Dr. Wecht will present on the evidence of conspiracy in the autopsies of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
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Andy Winiarczyk: No JFK assassination conference would be complete without Andy Winiarczyk and “The Last Hurrah Bookshop.” Andy majored in English at the University of Notre Dame and holds a master’s degree in Irish study from University College in Dublin. He has completed additional graduate work at the University of South Carolina and taught English for 14 years at the University of South Carolina and Williamsport Area, Pa. Community College. Andy has owned The Last Hurrah Bookshop –which specializes in books on political assassinations, modern American politics, and espionage — since 1982, and he began selling books at these conferences in 1991. Since then Andy and his books have been a fixture at more than fifty conferences in cities as varied as Dallas, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Bethesda, Memphis, Los Angeles, Providence, Pittsburgh, and more. Authors wishing to make certain their books are available at the conference can contact Andy at 570-360-1153 or Jerry Policoff at 717-682-4434. AARC can order authors’ books for sale at the conference if Andy does not have them in stock. Authors will be responsible for covering the cost of any book orders we fill for them.
“The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography,” 1963-1979 (Greenwood Press, 1980). He is also author of the newly published, “The Zapruder Film” (University Press of Kansas). In his 40 years of research and reading on the assassination, he has concentrated on the evidence found in files of the FBI and has sued the government for Zapruder film records, especially relating to its acquisition and purchase. Professor Wrone received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Illinois-Urbana. He is Secretary and a member of the Board of Directors of the AARC. [/intense_column] [/intense_row]