CounterPunch  is at times a valuable journal. But apparently they cannot outgrow the legacy of Alec Cockburn. What he represented on Kennedy and Vietnam was a gross distortion of historical fact, which is a shame when it’s done by the Left as well as the Right, laments Jim DiEugenio.

Michael Le Flem finds this brief book on one of the most important figures in the history of United States psychological warfare and propaganda, Time-Life managing director C.D. Jackson, an engaging, nuanced and timely addition to Cold War historiography.

Jim DiEugenio responds to a recent hit piece which uses Joe Kennedy III's State of the Union reply as a platform from which to launch yet another doctrinaire and uninformed attack on JFK and RFK, claiming that the latter's grandson is just another "false progressive idol" like his great uncle.

Robert Parry has left us at the young age of 68.  Read this tribute by his son Nat Parry.

One of the lesser appreciated programs instituted by President Kennedy, the Alliance for Progress, intended as a way of freeing Latin America from the yoke of U.S. and European entrepreneurial exploitation, encouraging its economic independence and broadening political participation and self-determination, like nearly all of his foreign policy strategies, met with hostility at home and was reversed subsequent to his assassination, as author Michael Le Flem discusses.

Part 2 of the interview by David Giglio of Our Hidden History with Jim DiEugenio, covering 1963-1975.

The following interview was conducted by David Giglio of Our Hidden History with Jim DiEugenio about his four part review of the Burns/Novick PBS documentary The Vietnam War. But it goes beyond the material in that series and uses information recently declassified by NARA.  Part 1 covers 1945-1963. (Click on the image for the audio.)

The best volume on Robert Kennedy I have read since Arthur Schlesinger’s two volume set in 1978. If you want to know about Bobby Kennedy’s life, the Schlesinger book is your choice. But if you want to know who RFK was in his last years, this is the book to read. No politician I know of ever did or said these kinds of things at home and abroad, writes Jim DiEugenio.

By Vincent Bevins, at: The Atlantic

The best evidence for the triumph of neoconservatism, including over PBS, is to compare the 1983 series, Vietnam: A Television History, with the Burns/Novick version. The former is more honest, more hard-hitting, and more complete on the facts of the war. In a very real way, that comparison tells us how the Nixon/Kissinger view of Vietnam and the world eventually eclipsed JFK's, concludes Jim DiEugenio.