6 July, 2025
Professor Joan Mellen
Professor Joan Mellen: prolific and distinguished author, historian, and educator; an authority on Jim Garrison and his investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination which caused ripples and reverberations within the federal government’s halls of power; she was the bestselling author of twenty-five books, including A Farewell to Justice, her biographical study of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans investigation. She has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Baltimore Sun. Professor Mellen was a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2004, she was awarded one of Temple University’s coveted “Great Teacher” awards for outstanding achievement.
Genres: Film, Biography, American History, Novels. Career: Professor, Temple University, Philadelphia. Publications: A Film Guide to the Battle of Algiers, 1973; Marilyn Monroe, 1973; Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film, 1973; Voices from the Japanese Cinema, 1975; The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, 1976; Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film, 1978; (ed.) The World of Luis Buñuel, 1978; Natural Tendencies, 1981; Privilege: The Enigma of Sasha Bruce, 1983; Bob Knight: His Own Man, 1988; Kay Boyle: Author of Herself, 1994; Hellman and Hammett, 1996.
Visit Professor Mellen’s Author Page at Amazon.
Her most recent works include Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas, and Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Conspired to Ambush the USS Liberty.
Newly Published: “Sherlock Being Catfished,” a Memoir by Joan Mellen
Joan Mellen has a new book, “Sherlock Being Catfished,” a memoir and departure from her usual works, with many references to JFK assassination research.
Personal Appreciation
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From our most esteemed colleague, Malcolm Blunt:
“She was a force of nature and a force to be reckoned with. No two people are the same, but in a way, I am reminded of Harry Livingstone: a person who wrestled with his ‘demons.’ Both of them suffering a difficult past…..sometimes the ‘demons’ won and sometimes the ‘demons’ lost…..Joan could be at the extreme end of anything, but was also the kindest soul. She was a very dear friend and colleague who contributed a great deal and whose legacy to the JFK research community will be increasingly recognized and appreciated over the years to come. Joan Mellen, a lady our French friends would describe as, ‘une grande dame.'”
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21 January, 2021
Professor Gerald D. McKnight
October 12,1932 – January 30, 2021
Remembering Gerald D. McKnight | David R. Wrone
Now cracks a noble heart. Gerald D. McKnight has died. Implacable Death took him on January 30, 2021, from his medical/retirement home in Lawrence, Kansas. He had been ill for many months.
For many years as a professor of history he had taught history at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where he also had served as the chair of the History and Political Science Department. Noted for his outstanding character and gentle manners, the faculty held him in great respect, with administrators knowing he was a rock that they could depend upon, whose fair judgments and consistently sound collegiate outlook they could rest assured to find in his apt comments, good advice, and proper actions. But his greatest noted quality as a professor came in his love of teaching, which was marked by splendid lectures infused with inspiring principles and insights. His enlightening courses lit the path for the life journey of generations of students.
One could not be in his company long ere he would mention a book on a subject or on one he was reading, for in this darkening age when reading and books have increasingly become a negative character quality among so much of academia, his reliance on these foundation building blocks of knowledge was a joy to hear. Indeed, at his home one could not go far without coming into contact with these repositories of our accomplishments in civilization and transmitter of ideas. His near neighbor was the indefatigable assassination scholar Harold Weisberg whose friendship with Professor McKnight over the years grew in their common causes.
As he taught and read, he became more disenchanted with the literature and press coverage on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The result came to an exceptional well-written history, The Last Crusade; Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI and the Poor People’s Campaign on the largely neglected but as he found to be the lynchpin of understanding the last years of the civil rights movement and indeed an unhappy influence on the course of American history.
In the course of his labor, he became friend and boon companion with Clayton Ogilvie who had similar interests and unusual skill for digitizing documents. Professor McKnight negotiated with Hood College’s librarians to become the repository of Harold’s records and personal papers that filled approximately 150 four-drawer file cabinets. Here are deposited hundreds of thousands of pages of FBI FOIA documents garnered by Weisberg (with the legal work of his attorney Jim Lesar) in fiercely contested lawsuits as well as his archival records. The records of critics Sylvia Meagher, Ray Marcus, Hal Verb and others were later added. In the days preceding Harold’s passing Ogilvie, in turn, committed to Harold that he would digitize all of his record to ensure his legacy of open access to his records would continue. In the last two years preceding Gerry McKnight’s passing, Ogilvie, in turn made the same commitment that Gerry’s records would also be digitized and preserved like Harold’s. Freely available over the net, they have become an often-used resource for students and scholars, both in the United States and in foreign lands. The digital records constitute solid pillars in a temple monument erected for the study of American History in the last half the 20th century.
Professor McKnight organized and hosted several JFK assassination conferences at Hood College and traveled to present at the Dallas-UK in Canterbury, England. His last JFK lecture appearance was at the Mid-America conference in Springfield, Missouri.
In 2005 he published his superbly researched and organized Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why.
Supplementing the documents to be found in the Harold Weisberg Archive, Gerry frequented the National Archives to augment his knowledge base to draft his book on the Warren Commission. Among Gerry’s many points to be found in Breach of Trust was that Commission staff included spies inserted by the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency; the Commission’s work was stained by the corruption and manipulation of the military. One member acted as an informer for the CIA, another for the FBI. Incompetent and prejudicial information that would not be permitted in a formal judicial proceeding was free to enter the record from state and primarily federal investigators to make a prosecutorial indictment. Gerry was able to document the suppression of material that would have exculpated Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, in favor of editing critical assassination reconstruction timelines and ignoring witness statements that were inconveniently subverting their preconceived solutions to the crime.
All the Commission’s efforts and those of subsequent “investigative” agencies’ efforts that followed seemed designed to deflect an impartial assessment of the facts left a rich documentary record for diligent scholars such as Professor McKnight to examine. Gerry was a scholar; he knew his craft well knew; he taught his students how to research and document their findings as they carefully read the primary documentary evidence. He left behind an exemplar for investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy’s murder as forensic investigation free of political Procrustean artifice.
In retirement, as disease wracked his body and age limited his mobility, he remained hard at work assembling and organizing his many notes taken from government documents at the National Archives to prepare an addendum to his Breach of Trust. He sought to write the history of the critical first ten days of the Warren Commission inquiry and the background of the man wrongly charged with the crime. As weakness slowed his steps, and his mind began to wander, he bequeathed his notes, his documents and his initial chapters to the Harold Weisberg Archive to serve as catalyst for a new generation of historical researcher to pick up his mantle and to rid the historical record of its circumambulations and obfuscations. He thought American CAN handle the truth!
Gerald D. McKnight has departed this plain of existence. He has paid his obol to the boatman Charon, who, as flights of angels sung, rowed him across the dark and roiling waters of the river of mortality to a port in the Elysian Fields. We know that then the trumpets sounded from the other side to welcome him home.
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David R. Wrone, Ph.D. is a former professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where he taught American history, Indian history and the JFK assassination for 35 years. He has published numerous book reviews on the subject and edited The Legal Proceedings of Harold Weisberg General Services Administration (1975), the court record on the fight to obtain the January 27, 1964 executive session transcript of the Warren Commission, and co-edited, with D. Guth, 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 an esteemed member of the AARC’s Board of Directors.
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10 November, 2024
Dr. Donald B. Thomas
1949 – 2024
Dr. Donald B. Thomas (1949 – 2024) was a board member of the AARC. He authored or co-authored 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: Social Constructivism and the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination, a book which places the acoustical evidence in a larger context.
Dr. Donald B. Thomas on C-Span
Thomas became interested in the assassination of John F. Kennedy after reading an article in Newsweek about Oliver Stone’s film, JFK. As Thomas points out: “Here was a six-page cover story article which was entitled “Twisted History,” claiming that Oliver Stone’s movie was – implying at least – that it was a pack of lies, and yet in the entire article, they did not cite a single example of a falsehood or an untruth – an error – and that struck me as odd. So I started reading about the assassination, and of course, I got especially interested in the scientific evidence, and that led into the – eventually – working on the acoustics evidence.”
Articles by Thomas include: Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination (2001), Hear no Evil: The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination (2001), Crosstalk: Synchronization of Putative Gunshots with Events in Dealey Plaza (2002), and Impulsive Behavior: The CourtTV – Sensimetrics Acoustical Evidence Study (2003).
His AARC Archive may be visited by clicking HERE.
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13 May, 2024
Dr. Cyril H. Wecht
1931 – 2024
Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, an indefatigable force of nature who defined his life through action and integrity, has died at the age of 93. America’s most prominent forensic pathologist, Dr. Wecht consulted on many high-profile cases and was perhaps best known as an articulate and passionate critic of the JFK autopsy and of the lone assassin findings of the Warren Commission. He was past president of both the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American College of Legal Medicine and sat on 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. He was the distinguished Professor of Pathology at Carlow University. High-profile cases he worked on include Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Brian Jones, The Symbionese Liberation Army shootout, President 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, Dr. Wecht performed more than 14,000 autopsies. He was 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 participated as a consultant for Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. In 1982 he was the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate opposing John Heinz. Wecht fiercely contested the official government conclusion that a single bullet caused seven non-fatal wounds to President Kennedy 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. He was founder and president of Citizens Against Political Assassination (CAPA). He was a dedicated and inspiring educator, speaker; an advocate of reason and principle who played a visible and leading role within the JFK assassination research community.
LISTEN to Alan Dale’s JFK Conversation with Dr. Wecht by clicking HERE.
CLICK HERE TO READ Cyril Wecht and the Magic Bullet by Dr. Donald B. Thomas.
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8 May, 2024
Adam Walinsky
1937 – 2023
Attorney, speechwriter and aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. A proponent of peace, a passionate advocate for civil rights and progressive social policies, whose eloquence and idealism equaled his directness and pragmatism. He was perceived by many to have been to RFK what Ted Sorensen was to President Kennedy. Many of his words and phrases will live in perpetuity. He is credited with primary authorship of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s eulogy of his brother, delivered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 8 June, 1968:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him, and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others, will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him, ‘Some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?’
Click on this title for AARC Board member David Talbot’s remembrance: Adam Walinsky, Restless in Peace
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15 April, 2021
Professor John McAdams
1945 – 2021
“One wonders why these agencies were so obsessed with the critics, no?
Maybe we have mirror image attitudes here. As the “critics” did not merely think they were trying to solve a crime, but rather were in a battle for the soul of America (which had become corrupt) . . .
. . . maybe some of the people in security agencies thought they were fighting for the soul of America, which had become besmirched by the corruption of conspiratorial thinking.
In other words, maybe people on both sides invested the issue with a huge moral significance, and therefore acted in ways that no sober citizens or unbiased investigators should have.
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