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The Talbot-Croft Archive: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

MERcbf55ca814f96a9ba6baa35a9061a_talbot0115copy-300x200 The Talbot-Croft Archive: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

A portrait of David Talbot at The Green Arcade bookstore, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, in San Francisco, Calif. Talbot shares his experiences following his stroke in his new book, Between Heaven and Hell.

The Assassination Archives and Research Center, in cooperation with the Mary Ferrell Foundation, announces an extraordinary research resource: The Talbot-Croft Archive. This archive features the recorded conversations and transcriptions that were developed as primary sources in researching David Talbot’s books, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007) and The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (2015).

This project is made possible with the permission of the author, David Talbot and his long-time research associate, Karen Croft, whose participation and involvement was integral to the creation and collection of these materials.

61vDdSKxPL._SL1360_-1-200x300 The Talbot-Croft Archive: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.Interviews preserve and document perhaps our most precious resource, the stories of those who have made history as told in their own words. It is through the dedicated efforts of historians, authors, the men and women who practice objective and accountable investigative journalism, by which we may delve most deeply into our past. For those to whom history is more than the record and analysis of documented events, little can be of greater value than the candid reflections of those whose lives have influenced its shaping. History may have many authors and many voices, but once those figures have passed and those voices stilled, we are left to study what remains: the documented record of their words and deeds.

“The greatest brotherly duo in American political history. They gave their lives for the country — and they died for a reason, not simply at the hands of two ‘lone nuts.’  Those who know the true story of the Kennedy brothers’ lives (and I’m not talking about the PBS version) know how truly heroic they were.”

— David Talbot speaking about John and Robert Kennedy, (2016)

content-200x300 The Talbot-Croft Archive: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.This introduction addresses two equal sides reflected within this project for which David Talbot is responsible. The first pertains to the unique value of unscripted and unrehearsed personal interviews with historical figures. The second, of course, must recognize the strength of David’s ethics, his social conscience, his deeply compassionate conception of literary and social objectives which convey his concerns about where things have gone terribly wrong and how, if we are all properly informed (hidden history-wise), we can work together to make our society better for all. In considering essential points that should be communicated in this introduction, we acknowledge the inseparable connection between the stories he chooses to explore, his intrinsic determination to focus his attention upon darkly complex and meaningful subjects and the absolute integrity of his personal and professional character. It is sometimes said that great works are the product of great souls. David’s life and his works exemplify the best of what it was to which John and Robert Kennedy, and the band of brothers who served them, were so passionately committed: Full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

His works are a gift to all of us who are haunted by living in a society that emerged after our hopes, and perhaps our destinies, were disrupted by gunfire.

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

(Ulysses, Tennyson)

Special thanks to AARC president, Dan Alcorn and MFF president, Rex Bradford; courtesy of David Talbot and Karen Croft, we are honored to present The Talbot–Croft Archive.

Dedicated to the memory of John and Robert Kennedy and to all those who continue to seek a newer world.

INTERVIEW 02

Audio: Peter Maheu

Transcript: Peter Maheu

Peter Maheu (10 June, 1942 – 6 April, 2016) was a businessman and former employee of CIA and Howard Hughes. He worked for his father, Robert Maheu, who was an extremely well-connected American businessman and lawyer, and for billionaire Howard Hughes. In 1963 Peter Maheu worked within CIA’s Office of Security. He was a licensed private investigator in Nevada and California, became a world leader in assuring regulatory compliance in the gaming industry. He wrote articles and lectured extensively on preventing business fraud. And he became involved in the emergence of overseas gaming, focusing on keeping organized crime out of casinos in those burgeoning markets.

Peter Maheu delivered lectures before some of the world’s most prestigious groups. Among them were the World Presidents’ Organization, the International Masters of Gaming Law Conference, the International Association of Gaming Attorneys Conference and the North American Gaming Regulators Association.

Early on, Peter worked for his dad’s company, Robert A. Maheu and Associates, where Peter played a major role in the management of not only Hughes’ gaming properties but in Hughes’ vast Nevada real estate and mining interests. Much of what are now high-end residential communities in northwest Las Vegas were built on land Hughes purchased as barren desert.

After breaking out on his own, Peter Maheu founded — and was president of — Trademark Protection Services, where he specialized in preventing trademark and copyright infringement on his clients’ brands.

TPS was said to have been at one time the nation’s largest firm of its type, with 30 offices nationwide that each employed a cadre of investigators and attorneys. Maheu’s clients included such business giants as 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Co., Mirage Studios and Hard Rock Café.

He was known for his work with the Honor Flight Network of Southern Nevada, a non-profit group that sends World War II veterans to Washington, D.C., to visit memorials created in their honor. He was also involved in the business investigation company, Global Intelligence International.

ADDENDUM from AARC President Dan Alcorn: Peter Maheu’s father, Robert Maheu’s first job for CIA was to block Aristotle Onassis from shipping the Saudi oil. Maheu installed a telephone tap on an Onassis phone in New York. CIA favored Stavros Niarchos for the contract. CIA’s Al Ulmer went to work for Niarchos in London in 1962. Niarchos was a client of Werner von Alvensleben.

*****

INTERVIEW 01

Audio: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Transcript: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.  (born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger’s work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and “court historian” to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president’s state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote a popular biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, several years later. He later popularized the term “imperial presidency” during the Nixon administration in his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency.
RELATED: 30 June 1961 Memo for the President
CIA Reorganization, RIF 176-10030-10422

Schlesinger Memo 176-10030-10422

BLOG: The David Talbot Show

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: AARC, ARRB, Arthur Schlesinger, Assassination, Bob Maheu, David Talbot, HSCA, JFK, JFK files, Jr. CIA, Karen Croft. JFK Records, Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Peter Maheu, Robert Maheu

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

41xNTjCd76L._SX331_BO1204203200_-200x300 Publication Spotlight: Professor David R. Wrone Reviews Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years10 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

jfk_assassination 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.

c69ba1540d9f1cd78502ee26bbaadfea Kennedy Assassination Intrigue Swirls in D.C. Federal Court

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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