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Publication Spotlight: Professor David R. Wrone Reviews Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

10 May, 2007

Dr. David R. Wrone is a retired professor of history, University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point

David Talbot, Brothers:  The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, New York: Free Press, 2007.  Pp. xvi, 478.  $28.00.

Based on wide-ranging interviews with associates of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, the founder of Salon.com, David Talbot, gives us a hitherto hidden picture of those years, 1960-1968.  It is a great work and well written.

Even as he took office JFK confronted military and CIA forces who moved to control policies and thrust America into nuclear war.  This continued throughout his 1000 days as he with his brother fought to block the right wing, CIA, and military’s drive for a nuclear war and control of national policies.  Talbot reveals that in the Bay of Pigs invasion the military had a covert plan to use it to pull JFK into a major war, which he blocked by his courage to stand up to the generals and CIA.  In Laos and later Berlin nuclear war was the military design for “victory,” that he resisted.  He soon learned the military had designs for a sneak attack on Russia and China with nuclear weapons that he scuttled.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) he initially stood with only his brother Robert against the clamor of the Joint Chiefs who wanted an invasion.  Unbeknownst to the U. S, the Soviet troops had scores of nuclear missiles on the island that if we invaded would have been fired at America and have launched the world into a nuclear holocaust.  The generals and admirals counted JFK’s peaceful solution as the worst defeat in the nation’s history and hated him with unbridled passion.  The CIA and FBI constantly surveilled him.

In the FBI Attorney General Robert Kennedy confronted a racist, reactionary institution.  He had to assemble his own team of agents from other departments’ scraps to carry out JFK’s and his policies.  His life was constantly threatened by criminal elements requiring him at times to bring in personal friends from the marshal service whom he could trust to guard him and his family.  One great unsung accomplishment was to cripple organized crime’s movement to take over government functions for they had become a growing force threatening the nation itself.

By November, 1963, as JFK moved to disengage from Vietnam, abate Cuban tensions, restructure the CIA, and establish detente bullets cut him down.

Not for a minute did Robert Kennedy believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed his brother, but within hours came to believe reactionary American forces slew him.  If Oswald was involved at all it was as a minor player.  Immediately after the funeral he dispatched a family friend to the Kremlin to inform the Soviets not to believe the story of what happened circulating in federal circles.  He informed his closest friends that it would require the power of the presidency to find the culprits.  His search for the murderers never ceased.  In efforts to find information it went to surprising lengths, including a secret meeting with teamster Jimmy Hoffa.

In a frightening point Talbot convincingly shows how the intelligence agencies have since the death of the Kennedy brothers insidiously fed untrue information about them to Congress and to happy conduit reporters like Sy Hersh.

What is so striking in this remarkable volume is what is not there.  At the national level Robert Kennedy almost stood alone in his fight to find his brother’s killers while the prominent academicians, the intellectuals, JFK’s aides, and the Democrat Party of the nation (and Wisconsin) either stood to the side or clasped the whitewash of the Warren Report.  It was left to the remnants of the old progressives and the youth of the sixties, to the housewives and bartenders, to continue the struggle and show two or more riflemen slew JFK and none of them Oswald but alas still not to know the exact forces behind it.

Brothers appears in the midst of a number of major books by long retired CIA men and blind supporters of the Warren Commission either seeking to affirm its findings or to besmirch the Kennedys, the men and their policies.  Some of these are: A CIA veteran Tennant H. Bagley, in Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (Yale, 2007) claims the 1964 Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko was a master spy and Oswald a red. Yet, the clear evidence proves Nosenko who had seen Oswald’s file in the Kremlin was genuine and his terrible torture by the CIA the work of paranoids.

What Bagley wants to hide, as the CIA did from the American people, is Nosenko related the Soviets found Oswald to be a right winger who with a shot gun could not hit a near rabbit and they also thought him a U. S. sleeper agent.  Larry Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (Perseus, 2007) claims his CIA station did not assassinate the liberal Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, a deed that forced JFK to work with the right wing.  However, Belgian and American investigative reporters’ recent accounts soundly refute Devlin.

Vincent Bugliosi’s heavily promoted Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Norton, 2007) in 1750 pages seeks to crush critics of the Warren Commission to prove Oswald indeed was the lone assassin.  It trumps Gerald Posner’s Case Closed as the most error ridden work on the murder.  Soon responsible critics—not theorists or buffs, but solid scholars, attorneys, medical doctors, scientists, forensic authorities, and subject matter experts —using the internet, the only mechanism open to them to respond, will be mounting their massive criticisms of its host of common errors, its sustained omissions of central facts, and its blatant corruptions of evidence.

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: David Talbot, JFK, Kennedy assassination, PRESIDENT KENNEDY, RFK

Kennedy Assassination Intrigue Swirls in D.C. Federal Court

TIM RYAN | April 4, 2017 | Courthouse News Service

WASHINGTON (CN) – The journalist behind Salon.com has brought a federal complaint to get records on the ex-CIA official at the center of congressional investigations into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

David Talbot, who has claimed in books and articles that Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy, says he asked the State Department and CIA for travel records and other documents about William “King” Harvey.

At the CIA, Harvey worked on a program known as ZRRIFLE that recruited criminals in Europe to help conduct assassinations for the United States.

Talbot also requested “passport and visa records” on F. Mark Wyatt, a former CIA officer who Talbot claims suspected Harvey knew of the assassination in advance.

“F. Mark Wyatt attended a CIA meeting with Harvey on Sardinia in Nov. 22, 1963,” the complaint states. “When news of the Kennedy assassination reached them, Harvey blurted out remarks that led Wyatt to suspect that Harvey had prior knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.”

Talbot wanted any photographs that the CIA had of Wyatt and Harvey. He notes that Harvey worked with Mafia members to try to take out former Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but was forced out of the program in 1962 after he sent “a series of raiding parties into Cuba at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

In his 12-page complaint, filed Friday with a federal judge in Washington, Talbot says the State Department gave him just 5 full pages of the 10 documents on Wyatt it found. 

Talbot says the department took two years to let him know that it had no responsive records on Harvey.

William King Harvey

 

The CIA meanwhile turned over 419 pages of records, but it denied Talbot a fee waiver reserved for members of the media.

Talbot says these CIA files also proved to be highly redacted. He says the agency searched only two departments for Harvey’s travel records. The agency did turn over a single photo of Harvey.

The complaint includes little detail about what Talbot hopes to find in the documents, beyond citing articles and books he has written on the subject, including a November 2015 Salon article titled “Inside the Plot to Kill JFK: The Secret Story of the CIA and What Really Happened in Dallas.”

James Lesar, Talbot’s attorney, has not returned a request for comment. A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment, citing department policy to not comment on ongoing litigation.

On the same day Talbot filed his suit, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth tossed out an unrelated suit about footage of the Kennedy assassination.

While the most-complete film of the shooting is credited to Abraham Zapruder, a Russian immigrant living in Texas, the government also studied footage of it on Orville Nix’s home-movie camera.

Gail Nix Jackson brought a $10 million complaint in 2015 after the National Archives and Records Administration told her that her grandfather’s original footage had gone missing, along with the chain-of-custody index.

Lamberth dismissed the suit for lack of jurisdiction, saying the case belongs in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, not U.S. District Court.

Nix’s footage captured the Kennedy motorcade rolling through Dealey Plaza from opposite the grassy knoll.

The FBI and the House Select Committee on Assassinations used the film to investigate the shooting, but Nix also sold his footage to UPI for $5,000.

Jackson learned that the House Select Committee on Assassinations took possession of the original footage in 1978, and that committee was supposed to turn over the film to the National Archives when it completed its tenure.

Visit Courthouse News Service

 

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: CIA, David Talbot, F. Mark Wyatt, Orville Nix, William King Harvey, ZRRIFLE

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