How can one tell the story of American involvement in Vietnam without mentioning the Dulles brothers or General Edward Lansdale? With a full 18 hours at one’s disposal, I would have thought such a thing would be impossible. Yet with Burns and Novick, the impossible becomes the possible, writes Jim DiEugenio.

The following is the transcript of a talk Jim gave via remote connection for the seminar held at the Virginia Military Institute on Saturday, September 2, 2017.

In response to a scene in John Barbour's recent film, Jim DiEugenio once again drives home the contradictions, lack of attention to scholarly standards of historical analysis, and dishonesty in the position adopted by Noam Chomsky on both JFK's presidency and the facts and circumstances of his assassination.

What the Bishop-Veciana-Oswald connection may actually have involved could be hidden among the 1,100 long-suppressed CIA records related to the JFK assassination, including four of Phillips’ operational files and Veciana’s routing and record sheet, conjectures Prof. Fernandez.

An "incredibly improbable memoir ..., and the most incredible thing is how much of the story is demonstrably true", remarks Joseph Green, who further observes that "the author adopts a straightforward prose style and appears to be doing his best to give the truth as he sees it. For that he deserves some kudos."

On May 29, 2017, the nation commemorated the 100^th birthday of President John F. Kennedy. As we all know, Kennedy was cut down before reaching the age of 50. Yet, his short term in office still casts a giant shadow over contemporary American history.  As author Larry Sabato has shown, the vast majority of Americans believe that something went wrong with America after he was assassinated. We take this opportunity to remind us all of what might have been and to commemorate what was.  And it's important, too, to learn about the many things Kennedy achieved while in office, but which you won't hear about from today's mainstream media.

The images below are linked to a four-part slideshow and afterword featuring highlights from the life and political career of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35^th President of the United States, which we hope you will find informative.

~Jim DiEugenio

At: DW Made For Minds

In the first part of this projected multi-part series, the author reviews Oswald's "defection" to the USSR in the light of Cold War games and his possible connection to them, and proposes an interesting twist on what the role of his stay there may have been.

Because of its innumerable textual and sourcing problems, Tye's book is neither worth reading nor buying, concludes Jim DiEugenio, who is prompted to muse:  "Why did the author write the book? Only he can answer that question".

Extralegal assassinations, unwarranted domestic surveillance, interventionist wars at the behest of corporate interests, torture or other activities of that stripe – these all have their roots in the Dulles era in which covert, corporate power developed into a well-oiled and unaccountable machine running roughshod. These dark forces have continued to operate regardless of who is elected president; and the refusal to face them has caused the Democratic Party to lose its way, writes Alex Sill.