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RIPOSTE TO: “SIX SHOTS IN DALLAS” BY R. REIMAN (1)

D.B. Thomas, Weslaco Texas|16 March, 2020

What is there about the JFK assassination that invokes such heated denial? Is it something akin to what Knittel2 calls the “Historical Uncanny” in reference to holocaust deniers; that the truth is too uncomfortable? Have we been propagandized by the mainstream media3 to think that belief in conspiracy is a form of sociopathy? Is it refusal to accept that Earl Warren or the honorable men that sat on his Commission would have covered up a crime? The former Chief Justice provided the answer to that question in his autobiographical account4 of his decision to accept the chairmanship as from a need to avoid nuclear war by convincing the public of the truth; that there was no communist conspiracy. And need we remind everyone that three5 of the six Warren Commissioners later renounced the Commission’s findings? Or that the most recent official investigation of the assassination by the United States Congress6 concluded that John F. Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy? This vocal minority denies that separate but congruent lines of forensic evidence, discussed herein and elsewhere7 compels the conclusion that President Kennedy was killed by a gunshot that emanated from the Grassy Knoll. Contrary to the usual narrative, all of the forensic science is firmly on the side of conspiracy. There is no serious scientific debate on this issue, any more than there is serious scientific debate on evolution. And it is also a sad truth that the most demonstrably dishonest, pseudo-scientific “explain-aways” are uniformly concocted on the side of the lone-nut version. To be sure, there is no deficit of opinions un-tethered to fact on either side of the controversy. The article by Richard Reiman is a combination of both. It is not an isolated aberration, only the most recent.

Reiman anchors his essay to the Zapruder film and entitles his article “Six shots in Dallas,” a thinly disguised smear directed at the assiduously researched book “Six seconds in Dallas” by Josiah Thompson.8 A more apt title would have been, “Believe me, not your lying eyes.” Rieman argues that the events shown in the Zapruder film should not be taken at their face value. The rearward snap of the President’s head can be explained as a recoil; that if the single bullet theory is true, then there was no conspiracy; and finally, that the acoustical evidence for a gunshot from the grassy knoll has been discredited. To bolster these claims Reiman offers sophistry, non sequiturs, and errors of both commission and omission. It is clear from his essay that Reiman has no working knowledge of the Zapruder film. No, the double 8 mm Zapruder film is not 35 mm. And no, the Warren Commission was not the first analysis of the Zapruder film. That would be found in the FBI’s summary report9 published on 9 December 1963 when the Warren Commission was yet a gleam in Lyndon Johnson’s eye. Reiman pushes the false narrative that the opposing interpretations of the Zapruder film are between officialdom and conspiracist perpetrators who refuse to “contextualize” their opinions with other evidence. Reiman’s omission of the FBI report serves to disguise the fact that the two official government versions of the assassination were diametrically opposed to one another, as noted in the complaint sent by J. Edgar Hoover to Earl Warren when the latter’s report was published. There is no question as to which version is correct because both reports are in material conflict with the real evidence, including the events seen in the Zapruder film that Reiman dismisses as fraught with “a Rorschach-like ambiguity.”

To the point, the six shots in Reiman’s title consist of the three officially allowed gunshots and three supposedly corresponding frames from the Zapruder film. But Reiman’s chosen frames are: Z-313 (okay), Z-224 (okay) and Z-235 (WTH). What happened to Z-210, which according to the Warren Commission was the time of the first shot? According to Reiman Z-frame-235 was the first to capture Governor Connally’s reaction to a shot. This is not correct. Photo-grammetric research10 on the film, including the analysis by the photographic evidence panel of experts for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and by the ITEK Corporation, featured in the CBS program cited by Reiman, noted that Connally’s posture stiffened at Z-225, followed by the flip of his Stetson hat held in his right hand at Z-228, most likely caused by the missile that struck his wrist. Reiman’s selection of Z-235 seems to be a concoction to help support his false narrative about Z-frame 224.

Regarding the latter Reiman cites a computer study by Failure Analysis Associates11, or more accurately serial plagiarist12 Gerald Posner’s version of the study, as providing “mathematical certainty” for the single bullet theory. Of course, it did no such thing. Contracted by the American Bar Association for a mock trial, Failure Analysis presented both sides of the single bullet controversy. Failure Analysis rediscovered a fact long known to conspiracy buffs; that at Z-frame 224 the lapel on Governor Connally’s jacket flapped outward. Their trajectory analysis provided compelling evidence that the victims aligned in such a way at Z-224 that a single-bullet could have struck and passed through both men. The problem is that if such a thing happened (and some prominent conspiracy realists accept that it did) then CE-567, the shattered carcano bullet found in the limousine near Governor Connally’s seat was the most forensically likely candidate. And if so, ipso facto, one arrives at too many shooters and conspiracy. The Warren Commission version, a construct by its junior counsel Arlen Specter, was designed to explain away CE-399, the “magic” bullet. Firstly, there is no evidence that connects CE-399 to anyone’s wounds. The bullet was discovered on a wheeled cot at Parkland hospital on the afternoon of the assassination. The FBI opined that the cot was one used to bring President Kennedy to the emergency room. In contrast, and without supporting evidence, the Warren Commission concluded that it was a cot used for Governor Connally.13 In fact, the bullet was found on a cot with a stethoscope belonging to a nurse who had not treated either man.14 Secondly, other than being slightly out of round, CE-399 was undamaged. Forensic tests by the US Army’s weapons testing branch on behalf of the Warren Commission (and not disclosed by them) showed that whereas the deformation velocity of a Carcano bullet striking bone is 1400 fps (or 1100 fps if striking sideways) the bullet which hit Connally in the rib after passing through JFK’s neck was at least 1700 fps.15 Confirmatory tests in which goats were shot in the rib cage, after passing through a simulated neck, always resulted in the Carcano bullets being significantly deformed. Thirdly, forensic chemistry inculpates CE-567 and excluded CE-399 as the perpetrator of Connally’s wounds. Using Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis, significant quantities of lead at the exit hole in Connally’s shirt front and the reentry hole in the shirt sleeve were found,16 consistent with the exposed lead core of a deformed or broken bullet (such as the one actually found in the limousine) exiting the Governor and inconsistent with an intact copper jacketed Carcano bullet such as CE-399. Connally’s wrist injury was a laceration with metal fragments and fibers of cloth from the shirt carried into the wound, a scenario indicative of a broken rather than a smooth intact bullet such as CE-399.

Reiman’s misrepresentation of Z-frame-224 cannot be blamed on Failure Analysis or Gerald Posner. Reiman cites JFK’s “Thorburn Position” as the reason for selecting Z-224. FYI, there is no such thing as a “Thorburn” position. Ask any neurobiologist or anyone expert on spinal cord injury. It is a term made up by conspiracy denier John Lattimer17 seeking to make it look like there was a scientific explanation for why President Kennedy folded his arms in front of his body following the shot that struck the lateral process of his seventh cervical vertebra. The expectation from all medical knowledge and experience is concussion of the spinal cord resulting in an immediate flaccid paralysis rendering one incapable of arm movement. Lattimer seized upon a nineteenth century woodcut published by William Thorburn18 of a patient suffering a bilateral contracture in flexion, a condition characteristic of the recovery phase weeks and months after a spinal cord injury. It is not and cannot be the immediate and direct consequence of a transective or concussive injury to the spinal cord. Nor could the President have uttered his last words, “My God, I’m hit!” as recounted by secret service agent Roy Kellerman, seated near him in the limousine, inasmuch as the bullet had egressed through his larynx. Kennedy’s reaction, and words, shows that he had not been shot through the neck at this point. Rather he was displaying a classic startle reaction, a.k.a, the Moro Reflex, in which one assumes the posture known as the foetal position, which includes folding the arms in front of the body. In his false narrative Rieman combines the “Thorburn” fantasy with the single bullet theory stating,

“Moreover, Kennedy’s strange, sudden shift from a wave to an almost crossed arm position in frame 224 also supports the single bullet theory.”     

But contrary to Reiman’s assertion Kennedy’s startle reaction occurred much sooner. In another error of omission Reiman ignored the analysis of the Zapruder film published in the Journal of Forensic Science in 1971 by UC Berkeley physicists Don Olson and Ralph Turner.19 This study documented that JFK’s arm movement shifted from the wave at Rosemary Willis to fold in front of his body at Z-194, not Z-210 as claimed by the FBI and the Warren Commission, nor at Z-224 as claimed by Reiman. The FBI falsified the wounding sequence because JFK’s reaction occurred at a time when the foliage of a live-oak tree blocked the view of the limousine on Elm Street from the sixth floor window of the Book Depository. The FBI’s objective was to frame Lee Harvey Oswald. Based on the title, the objective of Reiman’s article is much the same.

One of the great mysteries of the JFK assassination is how otherwise rational people could have convinced themselves that the rearward movement of Kennedy’s head could be explained as a jet propulsion recoil. Where was the skepticism that should have followed from the fact that officialdom had suppressed both the Zapruder film and the autopsy photos, and had then lied about both, claiming that the President had suffered a “through-and-through bullet hole” near the occipital protuberance in the back of his cranium, and that “…the president fell forward, bleeding from the head.” Specifically, in the split second from the point of impact at Z-313 to Z-221 the presidents head went ten inches rearward. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to understand momentum; it is an everyday part of experience. We have all caught a baseball, or been bowling, or if one is not athletically inclined then have bumped into things. When an object in motion strikes another object, it pushes it in the same direction of movement. Thus, when Kennedy’s head is driven backward, as shown in the Zapruder film, it provides prima facie evidence that the shot came from the front, dovetailing with the “ear” witness accounts that shots emanated from the grassy knoll. The explain-away, jet-recoil theory was the brainchild of physicist Luis Alvarez. Alvarez had already staked a considerable part of his scientific reputation on the thesis that there was no conspiracy when he appeared on national television to put a Warren Commission friendly spin on Olson and Turner’s study with the oak-tree problem. Alvarez’ jet-recoil thesis was based on knowledge that a bullet striking human flesh distributes two forces: momentum, delivering a push away from the shooter, and kinetic energy directed radial to the bullets path. Alvarez knew that the latter was the more powerful, and that it is the cause of the terminal ballistic phenomenon called “cavitation.” Alvarez also knew that under just the right circumstances the cavitation could be translated into pressure and that the pressure could be translated into thrust. And, in theory at least, the thrust could be vectored in essentially any direction, even the direction opposite to the momentum. Writing in the American Journal of Physics,20 Alvarez explained his theory with equations, calculus and algorithms. What he did not do is insert values into those equations to show that the theory was plausible; values such as the weight of a human head, or the velocity and mass of a rifle bullet. Had he done so, he would have shown that it won’t work. So instead, he rigged an experiment using a melon and a hunting rifle to demonstrate his point in principle; fair enough. But then he crossed over to the dark side by claiming that melons and hunting loads were a realistic model system that could explain JFK’s head movement. In doing so Alvarez had cheated on both sides of the equation. By using hot loaded .30-06 rounds instead of the under-powered Carcano bullets found in the alleged murder weapon, he more than doubled the kinetic energy. And by using a melon, which doesn’t have a bone inside, he reduced the target resistance and thus the absorption of momentum, compared to a human head, by an order of magnitude. Reiman, who cites the work of Lattimer on “Thorburn,” overlooked that Lattimer21 provided empirical evidence against the jet-recoil theory by shooting melons with Carcano rounds – and producing no recoil. If the Carcano round could not thrust a melon, then there is no way it could move a human head which weighs three times as much. Not to mention, that in order for the jet recoil explanation to be viable the jetsam would have been necessarily jettisoned from an exit hole in JFK’s face. Hence the theory became, or should have become, obsolete when the autopsy photos surfaced, proving not only that was there no exit wound in the President’s face, but no entrance wound next to the occipital protuberance in the back of his head either. Instead, the autopsy photos show an apparent entrance wound in the right temple,22 just as the initial reports23 from Dallas said there was. And, as corroboration, the lateral x-ray from the autopsy shows the bullet’s track through the cranium as a trail of bullet dust aligning with the entrance wound in the right temple.22

The straight-forward, face-value filmed evidence is further corroborated by the acoustical evidence for five gunshots found on the Dallas Police tapes. But unable to contextualize the facts deriving from independent lines of evidence, Reiman discounts the analysis of the recordings of the gunfire as “subsequently discredited” without bothering to cite a source. For the record, the source was the aforementioned Luis Alvarez and allies. And also, for the record, in none of the studies published by Alvarez and his fellow perps, were they able to cite a single error, flaw or mistake in the factual evidence, the methodology, or the analysis by the HSCA’s acoustical experts. Rather, the critics argue that their conclusion must be wrong, a false positive, because the sounds identified as gunshots are not, according to them, synchronous with the time of the assassination. In point of fact, just the opposite is true.

Researchers Gary Mack and Mary Farrell discovered that the assassination gunfire had been captured by an open microphone on a police motorcycle in the President’s motorcade. In 1978, on the advice of the Acoustical Society of America, the HSCA contracted with the expert firm of Bolt, Baranek & Newman to analyze the police recording. Famed for their work on the Kent State shooting and the Watergate tapes, the scientists at BBN developed, patented and ultimately deployed the anti-sniper “boomerang” device used by our military. Application of that same technology, which uses the acoustical signature of the gunshot to locate the sniper, enabled the identification of the assassination gunshots on the Dallas police tapes including one that emanated from the grassy knoll. Certain that the conclusions would be challenged, the HSCA dutifully sought a second expert opinion. Again, on the recommendation of the ASA, sonar experts with the Computer Science Department of Queens College were contracted to assess the evidence and analysis. The second expert group not only confirmed the findings of the first, but applying sonar techniques, expanded on the analysis to show that the detection of a shot from the grassy knoll was even stronger than realized. The first lab, BBN, had shown that the sound patterns on the police tape matched to test shots fired in Dealey Plaza, one of them specifically to a shot fired from the grassy knoll. The second lab dissected the latter sound pattern to correlate each impulse with an echo producing structure on the northeast side of the plaza. But the most compelling evidence was the order in the matching data. That is, each putative gunshot on the police tape matched to a test shot recorded at a microphone position coherent with a motorcycle traveling along the motorcade’s route through Dealey Plaza.24 Not surprisingly, the audio sequence of gunfire exactly matches the video sequence of wounding seen in the Zapruder film. Specifically, the wounding events at Z-224 and Z-313 are exactly 4.8 sec apart in the video, and the grassy knoll shot and the immediately preceding Book Depository shot are exactly 4.8 sec apart on the audio record.

The assertion that the “gunshots” identified by the acoustical experts are non-synchronous with the time of the assassination relies on an anomaly in the recordings. The Dallas police were communicating over two separate frequencies. The sounds identified as gunfire are on Channel 1, the primary police channel. The broadcasts from the motorcade in Dealey Plaza are on Ch-2, an auxiliary channel. The suspect sound patterns on Ch-1 must be simultaneous with the corresponding events on Ch-2 if they are truly the assassination gunfire, and of course they are. A sequence of broadcasts on Ch-2 originating from the pilot car just ahead of the President’s limousine fix the time of the assassination; specifically with the announcement by Police Chief Jesse Curry that he was, “approaching the Triple Underpass.” The Triple Underpass is the Dealey Plaza landmark flanked by the Grassy Knoll. In close sequence the radio dispatcher announced the time as “12:30” followed twelve seconds later when Curry barked the orders, “Go to the Hospital, officers…Parkland Hospital” The Zapruder film, and others, shows the pilot car approaching the Triple Underpass at the time of the shooting. Near the end of the Zapruder film the pilot car stopped in the underpass and waited for the limousine to pull along-side. It was then that Chief Curry knew that the President had been hit and ordered the police to escort the limo to Parkland. If the sounds identified by the acoustical experts are truly the assassination gunfire, it would have been captured on Ch-1 simultaneous with the key “Triple-Underpass” broadcast on Ch-2, and so they are. The gunshot sounds on Ch-1 occur 121 sec after the dispatcher announced the time as 12:28, making it closely coincident with the CH-2 dispatcher’s time notation at 12:30. More precisely, the broadcast immediately preceding the Triple-Underpass broadcast by two seconds on Ch-2 came from deputy chief Fisher saying, “Naw, that’s alright, I’ll check it.” Through a radio phenomenon called “cross-talk” some of the utterances on Ch-2 had leaked over on to Ch-1. A fragment of that broadcast, “I’ll check it,” occurs two seconds before the first putative gunshot on Ch-1, providing a tie-point and exact synchroneity between the gunshots and the assassination. But Alvarez et al.25 found another instance of cross-talk more to their liking. Approximately 78 sec after “Triple-Underpass” the Dallas County Sheriff gave orders to surround the grassy knoll and “…hold everything secure until homicide can get in there…” A fragment of that utterance, the words “…hold everything secure…” bled over onto Ch-1, and is found virtually synchronous with the last alleged gunshot. Alvarez et al. insist that the latter broadcast represents the true tie-point, proving non-synchrony of the key events. It is true that the “Check” and “Hold” cross-talks are contradictory. But, the contradiction was not between the acoustical evidence and the recorded events, but rather with the timeline of the cross-talks. There are multiple crosstalk instances between the two channels and when any one is used as a tie-point, none of the others align with their counterparts across channels.26 If they don’t even synchronize with themselves they can hardly be relied upon to prove a lack of synchrony between other events. One or the other channel is a discontinuous recording causing the cross-talks to be offset from one another across channels. That being the case, the longer the time interval between any two events, the greater the chances of an offset or discontinuity in the timeline. The cross-talk closest to the assassination, and therefore the most reliable, is “I’ll Check it.” It is a measure of the honesty of the NRC report and the subsequent article by Linsker et al.27 that neither ever admits or acknowledges the synchroneity that arises from using “I’ll Check it” as the tie point between channels.

The capacity for denial on this event is so deep that it is at times layered, with one fantasy built upon another. For his book on Kennedy, Larry Sabato28 contracted with a consultant firm for an independent assessment of the acoustical evidence. Unable to penetrate the dense core of acoustical data, other than to repeat the NRC panel’s complaint that it must be a false positive, the firm “Sonalysts,” took a tangential approach and found corroboration in the motorcycle noise. Yes, corroboration. Specifically, two seconds before the assassination gunfire the motorcycle motor noise dropped by 75%. It then continued at low and seemingly idle level for about 40 sec before revving up and returning to pre-assassination noise levels. Had it occurred to the technicians at Sonalysts to match this audio record to the video record they would have found that it closely matched the actions of motorcycle patrolman H.B. McLain who can be seen in the Darnell film idling down Elm Street about 18 sec after the shooting. In succession McLain is seen passing the parked motorcycle of officer Billy Hargis who had stopped to search the grassy knoll for the shooter (the Bond Photo), and then as patrolman J.W. Courson pulled alongside him, about 40 sec after the drop in noise, the pair sped up and raced out of Dealey Plaza (the Cancellare photo).29 The acoustical matching places the motorcycle entering the intersection at Elm and Houston at the time of the first shot. Thus, the slowing of the motorcycle motor is consistent with McLain anticipating the hard left turn on to Elm, and the 40 sec of idle motor in the audio record is consistent with McLain’s motion and position in the filmed record. But instead of using the acoustically identified gunshots on Ch-1, or the “I’ll check it” broadcast for the time of the assassination, Sonalysts used the misaligned broadcast of “Hold everything secure” which is 87 sec after the “I’ll Check it” broadcast on Ch-2. Using the misaligned broadcast as their anchor made it appear that at the time of the shooting the motorcycle was moving at high speed, when the acoustics required that it was traveling at an average of 11-12 mph. So in other words, instead of using an independent and separate line of evidence (the films) to assess the opposing timelines of events from the two cross-talks on the police tape, Sonalysts relied on Alvarez’ false argument, found it consistent with its own view, and declared it correct. In logic this is referred to as a tautology; the vernacular term is less family-friendly.

One final point should be made because Rieman’s article is unfair to one of the most intellectually honest people in this whole business. Contrary to Reiman’s statement, Professor Josiah Thompson did not sketch frames from the Zapruder film from memory for his book, nor was his analysis strictly dependent on the Zapruder film. Reiman dismisses Thompson’s analysis insisting that Thompson had admitted to misinterpreting the film. Again, the truth is the opposite. For his book Thompson measured the direction of JFK’s head movement during the critical frames and found that although the head went backwards from 313 to 321, indicating a shot from the front, the head actually went forward between Z-312 and 313, a movement possibly induced by a shot from the rear as the Warren Commission had claimed. Thus, Thompson forthrightly admitted that the forward movement might be explained by a first, near simultaneous shot from the rear. Thompson was compelled to drop the latter point of view when further studies documented that Kennedy’s forward head movement, along with the heads of everyone else in the limousine (none of whom were shot in the head), began much earlier as a result of the driver hitting the brakes, around Z-frame 300 according to Luis Alvarez. So according to Reiman we should disregard the work of analysts who revise their views to fit new information. And instead of looking to consistency among separate lines of evidence, and corroboration in scientific forensic analyses, we should accord equal or more weight to the “explain-aways.” The Magic Bullet theory, the Jet Propulsion Recoil theory, Thorburn’s position, are all bunkum, or to use a modern term, “fake news.”

The gunshot that killed President Kennedy emanated from the grassy knoll, and thus, there was a conspiracy. It is time to set aside the denials and explain-aways, accept the facts for what they are, get over it, and move on. Serious research is focusing now on the identity of the perpetrators and their motives. The truth will set us free.

  1. Reiman, R. 2019. Six “Shots” in Dallas: “Framing” the perpetrator of the Kennedy Assassination through the Zapruder Film, 1963-2013. Journal of Perpetrator Research 2.2: 180-206.
  2. Knittel, S. 2015. The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity and the Politics of Holocaust Memory. Fordham University Press.
  3. Zelizer, B. 1992. Covering the Body: the Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the shaping of collective memory. Univ. Chicago Press.
  4. Warren, E. 1977. The Memoirs of Earl Warren, Doubleday, Garden City, NY.
  5. re: Commissioners Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper in, Epstein, E. J. 1966. Inquest: the Warren Commission and the establishment of truth. Bantam, N.Y. re: Commissioner Hale Boggs, in Fensterwald, B. 1977. Coincidence or conspiracy. Kensington, N.Y.
  6. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives. 1979. Investigation of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Select Committee on Assassinations. 95th Congress. House Report 95-1828. U.S. Gov. Print. Off. Wash. DC.
  7. Thomas, D.B. 2010. Hear no Evil. Skyhorse,
  8. Thompson, J. 1967. Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy Assassination. Bernard Getz Assoc. Berkeley CA.
  9. Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. Justice (Summary Report). 1963. Investigation of Assassination of President John F. Kennedy November 22, 1963. Warren Commission Hearings & Exhibits (1964) Vol. 1. Document 1. 400 pp. U.S. Gov. Print. Off. Wash. DC.
  10. HSCA Hearings vol. 6, p. 17. See also ITEK analysis for CBS program mentioned by Reiman, summarized in: Trask, R.B. 1994. Pictures of the Pain: photography and the assassination of President Kennedy. Yeoman, Danvers MA.
  11. Posner, G. 1994. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Random House, New York, NY.
  12. Elfrink, T. 2013. Posner Plagiarizes Again. Miami New Times, 20 May 2010. https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/posner-plagiarizes-again-6367387
  13. Warren Commission. 1964. The Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. U.S. Gov. Print. Off. Wash. DC.
  14. Thompson (1967) p. 177. See also Warren Commission Exhibit 1024 and HSCA vol. 7, p. 356.
  15. HSCA Hearings vol. 1, p. 396.
  16. HSCA Hearings vol. 7, pp. 239-240.
  17. Lattimer, J. 1980. Kennedy and Lincoln, Medical and Ballistic Comparisons of their Assassinations. Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovich. New York, NY.
  18. Thorburn, W. 1889. Cases of injury to the cervical region of the spinal cord: position of the elbows after injury to C-6 (level confirmed at autopsy). Brain 9 (1887): 510-543.
  19. Olson, D. & R.F. Turner. 1971. Photographic evidence and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. J. Forensic Science 16: 399-419.
  20. Alvarez, L.W. 1976. A Physicist Examines the Kennedy Assassination Film. American J. Physics 44: 813-827.
  21. Lattimer, J.K. J. Lattimer & G. Lattimer 1976. An experimental study of the backward movement of President Kennedy’s head. Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics 142: 246-254.
  22. The photo is available online and is reprinted in, Aguilar, G & C. Wecht. 2015. Junk Science and the death of JFK. Accessed at: aarclibrary.org/dr-gary-aguilar-junk-science-and-the-death-of-jfk/
  23. Warren Commission Exhibit 392, the Parkland Hospital admissions report of 22 Nov. 1963 by Dr. Robert McClelland states that the cause of death was “a gunshot wound of the left temple.” [yes, he confused left with his other left]. At the Dallas press conference that afternoon white house press secretary Malcolm Kilduff stated that white house physician George Burkley had told him that the President had been shot in the right temple. “It is my understanding that it entered in the temple, the right temple.”
  24. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Assassinations 1979. Investigation of the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Report 94-465. (Acoustics in Hearings Vol. 8).
  25. National Research Council. 1982. Report on the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics. No. PB83-218461. U.S. Dept. Commerce. Natl. Tech, Info. Serv. Springfield VA.
  26. Thomas, D.B. 2001. Echo-correlation analysis and the acoustical evidence in the Kennedy Assassination revisited. Science & Justice 41: 21-32.
  27. Linsker, R., R.W. Garwin, H. Chernoff, P. Horowitz & N.F. Ramsey. 2005. Synchronization of the acoustic evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy. Science & Justice 45: 207-226.
  28. Sabato, L.J. 2013. The Kennedy Half-Century: the Presidency, Assassination and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy. Bloomsbury. New York, NY.
  29. Details on the filmed evidence of McLain’s motorcycle can be found in, Trask, R.B. 1994. Pictures of the Pain: photography and the assassination of President Kennedy. Yeoman Press, Danvers MA.

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: grassy knoll, JFK, Kennedy assassination, magic bullet, R. Reiman, single bullet theory

Courtesy of Jefferson Morley’s The Deep State Blog: On JFK, Tulsi Gabbard Keeps Respectable Company

Jefferson Morley | February 21, 2020

Tulsi Gabbard speaking in Fairfax, Virginia, February 17, 2020.

On February 17 in Fairfax Virginia, Donald Jeffries, an author and talk radio host, asked Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard about a book she had been seen carrying, “JFK and the Unspeakable.” Published in 2009, the book is a Catholic philosopher’s meditation, driven by ethics and facts, about the assassination of a liberal president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, one of the great historical crimes of American politics,

Gabbard replied she had not finished the book, adding “from what I have read,

Gabbard replied she had not finished the book, “but from what I have read, it uncovers a lot things that speak to what happened [on November 22] in a way that I haven’t seen anywhere else.”.

It was a cautious statement but custodians of the conventional wisdom pounced, nonetheless. Before Jeffries posted the video on Facebook, Olivia Nuzzi, Washington correspondent for New York Magazine tweeted about Gabbard’s comment. University of Virginia historian and pundit Larry Sabato responded dismissively.

 

Sir Anthony @tbooth_98
 · Feb 17, 2020
Replying to @Olivianuzzi

@LarrySabato scary.

Larry Sabato

✔ @LarrySabato

It explains everything only if you possess a conspiratorial mind and choose to discount available evidence to the contrary.

33

8:02 PM – Feb 17, 2020

This lazy tweet is not only unfair to Gabbard, it scants “JFK and the Unspeakable,” among the best books on JFK’s assassination published in the last twenty years. Author James Douglass not only recounts the latest research about the national security power struggles that wracked Kennedy’s administration up to the day of his death. Douglass also grapples with why we, as a society, have such a difficult time talking about the meaning of JFK’s murder. To confront JFK’s death, he concludes, is to confront an act of evil that we find unspeakable.

Sabato’s sniping overlooks the fact that Gabbard’s doubts are hardly unknown in the American political elite. If the former Hawaii Congresswoman has a “conspiratorial mind,” then so do former Democratic presidential nominees John Kerry and Al Gore, and maybe even Bill Clinton.

In 2013 Kerry said he thought Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy, possibly emanating from Cuba, but declined to elaborate. At a joint campaign appearance in 1992, Clinton and Gore were asked if they thought JFK had been killed by a conspiracy. Oliver Stone’s “JFK” was a box office sensation at the time with its all-too-believable depiction of the assassination as a coup by the CIA and Pentagon. The ever-slippery Clinton deflected the question to Gore, who said yes, he thought there was a conspiracy. Clinton then agreed with Gore.

Once in office, Clinton changed his mind and said there was no conspiracy. He also appointed a civilian panel in 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board, that began declassifying millions of pages of long-secret JFK files, a process that is still not yet complete.

‘Felled by Domestic Opponents’

Now you could counter that candidates on the stump (or a retired Secretary of State) will say anything to please a crowd or attract attention. In 2016 Donald Trump smeared rival Ted Cruz with an unfounded claim that his father was involved in JFK”s assassination. But Trump’s mendacity should not obscure the record.

Robert F Kennedy on his brother’s death.

Numerous power players of the 1960s also had “conspiratorial minds.” JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, his brother Robert Kennedy, and his widow Jackie Kennedy all privately spurned the Warren Commission’s conclusion that JFK had been killed by a man with no discernible motive. None actually shared Sabato’s blithe belief that the Warren Commission’s account of Kennedy’s assassination is irrefutable.

According to historians Tim Naftali and Aleksander Fursenko, Robert and Jackie Kennedy told their painter friend William Walton just a week after the ambush in Dallas that they suspected JFK had been “felled by domestic opponents.” As recounted in David Talbot’s “Brothers,” RFK discretely investigated the possible involvement of CIA-funded Cubans and organized crime bosses in his brother’s death for the rest of his life.

Jackie Kennedy, in a 1964 conversation with William Manchester, demurred on the Warren Commission’s controversial theory that a single bullet had wounded both her husband and Texas governor John Connally. (The so-called “single bullet theory” is the forensic keystone on which the lone assassin theory depends.) Biographer Barabara Leaming wrote, “That’s certainly not how Jackie remembered it.”

Publicly, Lyndon Johnson endorsed the Warren Commission’s lone gunman conclusion. Privately, he scoffed at it, first to a CBS camera crew and then to Leo Janos, a writer for the Atlantic.

Other senior U.S. officials had the same reaction. Winston Scott, the chief of the CIA’s Mexico City station, suspected a conspiracy and wrote as much in an unpublished memoir. Former cabinet Secretary Joseph Califano wrote in his memoir that he thought JFK was the victim of a Cuba-related plot. Col. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon Special Operations in 1963 and later an adviser to Oliver Stone, was sure there was a plot. “The reason for the assassination,” he wrote, “was to control the power of the presidency.”

‘Law of Silence’

JFK and Jackie Kennedy arrive in Dallas,
Jackie Kennedy doubted the official story of her husband’s murder.

Foreign leaders too, concluded there had been a conspiracy.

French president Charles DeGaulle, canny conservative and survivor of a right-wing assassination attempt in 1962, said Kennedy’s enemies had gotten away with the crime. He predicted a “law of silence” would quash those who disagreed.

Fidel Castro, canny communist and survivor of dozens of CIA assassination conspiracies, concluded Kennedy had been killed by reactionary foes at home. “There were people in the American government who thought Kennedy was a traitor because he didn’t invade Cuba when he had the chance, when they were asking him,” the Cuban leader told Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in 2013. “He was never forgiven for that.”

“So that’s what you think might have happened? Goldberg asked.

“No doubt about it,” Castro answered.

On the question of who killed JFK some of us find LBJ, RFK, Jackie, and Castro more credible than J. Edgar Hoover, Gerald Ford, Richard Helms, and Chris Matthews. Feel free to disagree but please don’t say we’re irrational.

Last of the JFK Files

Not only is Tulsi Gabbard in good company when she doubts the official JFK story, she is also talking about an issue that will confront the next president

In October 2017, President Trump broke a campaign promise to release all the JFK files. He quietly issued a White House order saying he had “no choice” but to permit the CIA and FBI to keep secret thousands of JFK documents until at least 2021. According to the latest figures from the National Archives, 15,834 JFK files remain wholly or partially classified. In other words, it would be a crime to disclose their contents or talk about these JFK files publicly in 2020.

And why, you might ask, are the government’s JFK assassination secrets still unspeakable in 2020? That’s a vexing question. Tulsi Gabbard offended conventional wisdom by seeking the answer.

READ MORE AT DEEP STATE BLOG


Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: Donald Jeffries, JFK, JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy assassination, Tulsi Gabbard

Jean Daniel, Leading French Journalist and Humanist, Dies at 99

In France, where news and opinion are blurred, Mr. Daniel, a self-described non-Communist leftist, used journalism as a means of advocacy.

Jean Daniel in 2004. He used journalism as a means of advocacy and also had influence in high circles of the French government.Credit…Jean-Luc Luyssen/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

By Robert D. McFadden

  • Feb. 20, 2020

 

 

A half-century before President Barack Obama ordered a restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014, Jean Daniel, a French journalist on a secret mission to Havana in the autumn of 1963, delivered a proposal by President John F. Kennedy to Fidel Castro.

It was an offer to explore a rapprochement.

Despite the distrust and raw feelings of the Cuban missile crisis, which had nearly plunged the world into nuclear war a year earlier, Mr. Daniel, a confidant of political leaders in many capitals during the Cold War, found Castro surprisingly, if cautiously, receptive to Kennedy’s overture.

Three days later — it was Nov. 22, 1963 — over lunch at Castro’s seafront retreat on Varadero Beach, they were still discussing the offer when the phone rang with urgent news. Castro, the Cuban leader since 1959, picked up the receiver.

“Herido?” he said. “Muy gravemente?” (“Wounded? Very seriously?”)

Mr. Daniel — who died on Wednesday at 99 at his home in Paris, according to L’Obs, the left-leaning weekly newsmagazine he co-founded — recalled the dramatic scene with Castro in an article in The New Republic days after it happened.

“He came back, sat down and repeated three times the words: ‘Es una mala noticia.’ (‘This is bad news.’)” They tuned into a Miami radio station as the reports trickled out of Dallas. Mr. Daniel paraphrased them: “Kennedy wounded in the head; pursuit of the assassin; murder of a policeman; finally the fatal announcement: President Kennedy is dead.”

Both knew instantly that rapprochement had died with the president. “Then Fidel stood up,” Mr. Daniel related, “and said to me: ‘Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.’”

In the swirl of investigations and conspiracy theories that followed the assassination — many of them linking the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Castro — Kennedy’s offer became a footnote to history, and Mr. Daniel moved on to other crises in a career that touched major conflicts of an era: the French-Algerian war, Israeli-Palestinian clashes, Indochina, the Cold War and, more recently, terrorism

Mr. Daniel in 1979. He was the author of numerous books on nationalism, communism, religion, the press and other subjects.Credit…Georges Bendrihem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Daniel, a self-described Jewish humanist and non-Communist leftist, was one of France’s leading intellectual journalists, a friend and colleague of the philosopher-writers Jean-Paul Sartre, who rejected his 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Albert Camus, who accepted his 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature. Like Camus, Mr. Daniel was born in Algeria.

In France, where news and opinion are blurred and journals typically report and interpret events with a political or cultural bias, Mr. Daniel used journalism as a means of advocacy. He also had influence in high government circles. He was a friend of David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist who became Israel’s founding prime minister in 1948, and for 60 years he supported Israeli interests.

But Mr. Daniel also defended Palestinian and Arab rights. He condemned the Arab-Israeli War in 1967 as an unwarranted expansion by Israel. In lightning airstrikes and ground assaults, Israel inflicted heavy losses on the Arabs and seized the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem and cities and territory on the West Bank.

From 1954 to 1964, he was a correspondent and editor of the leftist weekly newsmagazine L’Express, which opposed French colonialism in Indochina and Algeria. He was also a confidant of Pierre Mendès-France, the French premier who withdrew French forces from Indochina after their defeat by Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

As a correspondent in Algiers, Mr. Daniel supported Algeria’s war of independence from French colonialism. But he also deplored torture and atrocities on both sides, which continued for decades after the brutal six-year war formally ended in independence for Algeria in 1962. Mr. Daniel was close to Ahmed Ben Bella, the revolutionary who became Algeria’s first president, in 1963.

In 1964, Mr. Daniel quit L’Express and co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur, a reincarnation of the left-wing newsmagazine France Observateur. Le Nouvel Observateur was later sold and renamed L’Obs. Under his direction for 50 years, Le Nouvel Observateur became France’s leading weekly journal of political, economic and cultural news and commentary. His editorials opposed colonialism and dictatorships, and ranged over politics, literature, theology and philosophy.

Mr. Daniel, who was also a correspondent for The New Republic in the late 1950s and early ’60s, wrote for The New York Times and other publications for decades. He was the author of many books on nationalism, communism, religion, the press and other subjects, as well as novels and a well-received 1973 memoir, “Le Temps Qui Reste” (“The Time That Remains”).

His book “The Jewish Prison: A Rebellious Meditation on the State of Judaism” (2005, translated by Charlotte Mandell) suggested that prosperous, assimilated Western Jews had been enclosed by three self-imposed ideological walls — the concept of the Chosen People, Holocaust remembrance and support for Israel.

“Having trapped themselves inside these walls,” Adam Shatz wrote in The London Review of Books, “they were less able to see themselves clearly, or to appreciate the suffering of others — particularly the Palestinians living behind the ‘separation fence.’”

Mr. Daniel was awarded the title Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor by President François Hollande of France in 2013.Credit…Pool photo by Etienne Laurent

Jean Daniel Bensaïd was born in Blida, Algeria, on July 21, 1920. His father, Jules, was a flour miller. As a young man, Jean moved to France, studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and enlisted in the Free French Forces during World War II. He fought at Normandy, in Paris and in Alsace.

In 1947, he founded the literary review Caliban, adopted the pen name Jean Daniel and was the editor until 1951. In 1948, with permission, he republished essays by Sartre, Camus and other intellectuals that had first appeared in the polemical journal Esprit. Camus wrote an introduction to Mr. Daniel’s first novel, “L’Erreur” (1953).

Mr. Daniel married Michèle Bancilhon in 1966. She survives him, as does a daughter, Sara Daniel, a reporter at L’Obs.

In the late 1950s, Benjamin C. Bradlee, a future executive editor of The Washington Post who was then a correspondent in France for Newsweek, became acquainted with Mr. Daniel through mutual contacts in the Algerian guerrilla group FLN. It was Mr. Bradlee, a longtime friend of Kennedy’s, who suggested Mr. Daniel when the president needed a private go-between to carry his proposal to Castro in 1963.

In a meeting at the White House, Kennedy asked Mr. Daniel to convey his view that improved relations were possible, and that the president was willing to authorize exploratory talks. Mr. Daniel met Castro in Havana on Nov. 19. He said that Castro had listened with “devouring and passionate interest” and expressed cautious approval of such talks.

Three days later, after learning that the president had been slain, Castro told Mr. Daniel, “They will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly; otherwise, you watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.”

After the announcement of Oswald’s arrest, Mr. Daniel recalled, “The word came through, in effect, that the assassin was a young man who was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, that he was an admirer of Fidel Castro.”

The Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination concluded in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy and that Jack Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald two days later. Its report has been challenged and defended over the years.

The stalemate between Cuba and the United States, meanwhile, was continued by eight American presidents until Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor, agreed on Dec. 17, 2014, to establish diplomatic relations, sweeping aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.

It lasted until President Trump announced in 2017 that he would keep a campaign promise and roll back the policy of engagement begun by Mr. Obama. He later reversed key portions of what he called a “terrible and misguided deal.”

Constant Mehéut contributed reporting from Paris.

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.

READ MORE at The New York Times

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 21, 2020, Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Jean Daniel, Journalist And Friend to Leaders Worldwide, Dies at 99.

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: Assassination, Castro, Cold War, Cuba, Jean Daniel, JFK, Kennedy

Publication Spotlight: American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Participating in the political destiny of our nation

Reviewed by Alan Dale | 9 January, 2020

There are moments when complementary facets of our lives come together and find expression in the form of a favorite song, a movie, a particular book.  I’m referring to what we’ve all experienced when the right something comes along at the right time. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s deeply personal memoir, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family is, for me, such a book.

American Values is an authoritative introduction to America’s preeminent political family. It offers candid revelations from the perspective of our guide who lives the meaning of his family’s name, and it conveys, directly and convincingly, how one may choose to respond to the complex forms of adversity befalling our nation and our world. It also informs us quite a lot about the way real power is exercised in the modern world and the formidable forces against which John and Robert Kennedy were pitted during the 1960s. Ultimately, we are allowed to accompany the author as he courageously follows a path of illumination while exploring the dark places and true circumstances by which his family’s influence and much of the world’s hope was disrupted by gunfire.

Beginning with Chapter One, “Grandpa,” readers of a certain age will be challenged to rethink whatever they have accepted as probably true about the people whose lives and careers are relevant to the telling of this story. Younger readers, who come to this work as an introduction, without having to divest themselves from decades of character assassination, mythology and misrepresentation, will benefit from this portrait of the author’s patriarchal grandfather, Joseph Patrick Kennedy whose “integrity and horse sense” established foundational principles which would be passed down through successive Kennedy generations. Readers young and old may be startled by the author’s brief but informative remedial history lesson as he examines important dynamics of social and political power structures of the 1920s and ’30s through which his grandparents lived and which stand as starkly relevant to understanding much of what confronts us today.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance, author of American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family

Recollections of youthful encounters with colossal figures such as LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, memorable conversational sketches of Allen Dulles and others by Kennedy family friends and relatives, all kinds of interesting observations, amusing anecdotes and perceptions abound across many pages, but astute readers will recognize very early on, there’s more being offered than charming reminiscences.  It is the backdrop, the context against which the array of privileged experiences being presented is told that distinguishes this narrative as particularly informed and noteworthy.  RFK, Jr. has committed himself to examining various manifestations of the national security state as it responded, adversely, to President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy and the reforms which they sought to ensure that our children’s children would be born into a world where reasonable men would value peace over war, justice over inequality, opportunity over exclusion, and freedom over the many different forms of tyranny and enslavement.

There is great joy and much color throughout this reading experience. There’s also the inevitable poignancy and heartbreak that we know. Above all, there is the ineluctable presence of unconditional love. Three people who receive special attention by the author are Lem Billings, Ena Bernard, and Ethel Kennedy. Their stories, and the very personal manner by which their stories are told, are among the most affecting of all that the author has shared.

American Values is an inspiring journey through one man’s life whose story is an astounding record of the people and events that shaped our nation during a period of unprecedented danger and opportunity. It is also an affirmation of all that we may see as what is best about our collective efforts as a nation, our collective aspirations to determine our destiny through the work of our own hands, to persevere through cruelties and obstacles, addictions, disappointment and profound loss, battling against complacency, facing our fears, while maintaining our faith, our conviction, and our willingness to dream things that never were, and say, “Why not?”

Five stars. Highest recommendation.

 

CLICK TO PURCHASE AMERICAN VALUES: LESSONS I LEARNED FROM MY FAMILY

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: American Values, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Jr., PRESIDENT KENNEDY, RFK, Robert F. Kennedy

RFK’s Secret Role in the Cuban Missile Crisis

Recently declassified information shows the critical part JFK’s younger brother played in resolving the Cold War’s most dangerous moment

  • By Matthew Hayes on August 6, 2019
RFK's Secret Role in the Cuban Missile Crisis
Credit: Bill Eppridge Getty Images

‘This is the result of the photography taken Sunday, sir. There’s a medium-range ballistic missile launch site and two new military encampments … in West Central Cuba. The launch site at one of the encampments contains a total of at least 14 canvas-covered missile trailers, measuring 67 feet long and more than nine feet in width.”

On a Tuesday morning in October 1962, these chilling words informed President Kennedy and his advisors that the Soviet Union was constructing nuclear missile sites in Cuba. Thanks to recording devices established and activated by JFK, we can actually hear CIA briefer Marshall Carter and deliver this precise analysis of U.S. spy plane photos. Their tone appears calm and measured, yet this briefing would light the touch paper for the Cold War’s most dramatic crisis. Nuclear missiles now lay in place merely 90 miles off the U.S. coast, contrary to the express assurances of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and in the face of repeated warnings from President Kennedy in preceding months.

These missiles presented a dramatic challenge to the precarious balance of Cold War power, and the next 13 days would see a dangerous stand-off between two nuclear superpowers with a combined arsenal of some 4,000 warheads. Before the crisis was resolved, one of these warheads would be ordered for launch.

Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s younger brother, was 36 years old at the time. One of the youngest attorneys general ever appointed, RFK was also the president’s de facto chief of staff and most trusted advisor. Known as “that terrier of a man” by some in the Kennedy administration, RFK was profoundly committed to his brother’s success. On the campaign trail for his brother years earlier he had remarked, “I don’t care if anyone likes me, so long as they like Jack.” He carried this temperament through to the president’s administration, doggedly pursuing his brother’s objectives, ever ready to cut through departmental etiquette to ask forceful questions and to challenge the answers.

By October 1962, he had already proved himself indispensable to the president. It was to his younger brother that the president had turned after a botched invasion of Cuba in 1961 (the Bay of Pigs fiasco), appointing him head of a task force examining the causes of the disaster. A year later, it was no surprise that RFK was one of the first to be notified of the missiles, receiving an urgent phone call from the president a few hours ahead of the CIA briefing.

In the coming days and weeks RFK would make a unique and indispensable set of contributions to resolving the crisis. We are now able to follow these contributions in rich detail, thanks to the remarkable in-the-room access provided by the White House tape recordings, as well as new archival sources recently declassified.

First, RFK went after the raw data. His personal files on the crisis hold as many as 3,584 documents directly reviewed by him over the period. Immediately after hanging up the phone to his brother, he coordinated a private briefing with the CIA. Joining cabinet discussions later that morning, RFK was already extremely well-briefed on the missile sites, their disposition and readiness.

Such preparation was an RFK trademark, especially where it required out-of-the-box thinking. In his private notes on the Bay of Pigs disaster, RFK had judged “underestimation” of Castro’s forces as a key failing of the Kennedy administration. Determined not to repeat the mistake, RFK was one of only two presidential advisors to predict the installation of missile sites in Cuba, warning his brother of the possibility over a year before the crisis.

He then took active measures to prepare for the possibility, instructing the Departments of State and Defense to investigate possible responses, whilst also outlining his own proposals in interdepartmental security briefings. These proposals were remarkably prescient of those actually debated and subsequently chosen during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a direct result of RFK’s proactive, terrier-like energy, the key government departments tasked with handling the Cuban missile crisis had been remarkably well-prepared in contingency thinking and intelligence.

Perhaps even more importantly, so had the president’s closest advisor. As the crisis developed, RFK continued to seek new information and advice, acting as his brother’s eyes and ears—able to go where he could not, to source frank perspectives unhindered by presidential deference. At times this meant spotlighting another advisor’s counsel in a cabinet meeting; at others summarizing a loud mess of opinions into a coherent range of actionable options for the president.

In a few unique circumstances, it even meant playing up a blunter edge to his persona, asking the sort of direct questions the president could not. In one remarkable exchange during the crisis, apparent in the tapes, the president can actually be heard whispering instructions to RFK on a difficult question he wanted put to the head of the CIA. RFK also held a number of pivotal one-on-one conversations with fellow advisors during the crisis, privately relaying these back to the president in a number of off-the-record discussions.

Indeed, we know, from diary entries, references in official memoranda and the tapes themselves, that RFK met privately with the president throughout the crisis. These were frank one-on-ones that gave the president an opportunity to talk through options freely, and RFK the chance to bring new information and advice to the president outside of busy group meetings. As Kenneth O”Donnell, JFK’s special assistant at the time, would later remark, “Bobby could always reach him.” On one evening at the height of the crisis, the two brothers even discussed JFK’s possible impeachment.

In the first days of the crisis, whilst other presidential advisors were still processing the shocking news, RFK jumped far ahead, coldly calculating and interrogating the possible U.S. response. He insisted that an invasion remain on the table, and even pushed for a reduction in the lead time required to initiate one. Until recently this approach was held up as evidence for a belligerent, hawkish advisor, promoting the sort of military action that would have led to dangerous escalation.

Yet declassified private notes, and a closer understanding of the brother’s intimate relationship, now support a more holistic view of RFK. He saw his role as pressing for all alternatives, regardless of where they might lead. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor at the time, RFK’s function was “to go and prod and poke people into doing their best, and staying with the problem, and not giving up until we got a better answer.” RFK would subsequently put his weight behind the famous blockade plan, a naval quarantine of Cuba designed to pressure the Soviets to remove the missiles.

CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

RELATED: Robert Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis:A Reassertion of Robert Kennedy’s Role as the President’s ‘Indispensable Partner’ in the Successful Resolution of the Crisis MATTHEW A. HAYES

Filed Under: News and Views Tagged With: Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK, RFK. John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy

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