Saturday, 09 January 2010 21:59

Did The Mob Kill JFK?

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It is evident that [the] three shows [reviewed in this article] reveal a rather unwelcome truth. That is, today's cable TV companies are just as psychologically and socially incapable of telling the truth about President Kennedy's death as the networks were in the sixties and seventies, concludes Jim DiEugenio.


Did the Mob Kill JFK? was broadcast right before another Discovery Channel program entitled JFK: The Ruby Connection in November and December of 2009. At the end of this review, I will specify why I find that to be retrospectively interesting and what it says about Discovery Channel. But first, let me answer the question posed in the show's title: Nope, not by themselves. In fact, I can think of no credible, respected JFK researcher on the scene today who thinks that the Cosa Nostra pulled off Kennedy's murder alone. Yet this program seems to foster that idea in a truly offbeat, even bizarre kind of manner. How does it do so?

By using three main talking heads who have serious credibility problems that the producers never tell us about. They are Robert Blakey, Lamar Waldron and Gerald Posner. With the choice of these three men, the Discovery Channel lets us know that, as far as they are concerned, they have no interest in dealing with any of the compelling new discoveries unearthed by the Assassination Records and Review Board (ARRB). This was the body constructed by congress to declassify thousands of documents on the JFK case that were classified until 2029. But alas, the program cannot inform us of that salient fact. Because if it did, Blakey would have to explain why he did it.

I

See, Blakey was the Chief Counsel of what Gaeton Fonzi memorably termed The Last Investigation. This was the congressional inquiry into the deaths of both President Kennedy and Martin Luther King by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). To say that he helmed that committee in an unsatisfactory and controversial manner is somewhat of an understatement. And to go into all of the shortcomings of the HSCA would take an essay about ten times longer than this one, and it still would not do it justice. (For a summary of the HSCA's failings, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pgs. 51-89) But I should note just one aspect in this regard. When the Warren Commission published its final report, it issued 26 volumes of evidence with it. When Blakey published his report, he issued only 12. Further, the HSCA saw many more declassified government files than the Warren Commission did, from agencies like the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service and the State Department. They also conducted many more independent interviews with important witnesses and in crucial areas. For instance, the medical interviews the HSCA did went much further than the shameful dog and pony show orchestrated by Arlen Specter for the Warren Commission. For instance the interviews done by the HSCA staff prove that there was a large avulsed wound in the rear of Kennedy's skull, which indicates that there was an exit wound there. And therefore an entrance from the front. To point out another area, the HSCA investigation of Oswald's background was much more extensive than the Commission's. They actually reviewed many CIA and FBI files about the pinko Marine who defected to Russia at the height of the Cold War, and then decided to return with a Russian wife. They also interviewed and investigated many more witnesses in New Orleans than the Commission did. And they went much further in uncovering Oswald's activities there. For example, they built upon the fascinating evidence first accumulated by Jim Garrison about the sighting of Oswald with David Ferrie and Clay Shaw in the Clinton-Jackson area.

Yet after seeing many, many more documents and conducting many more searching interviews than the Commission, Blakey then classified a larger volume of material than the Warren Commission had previously. And most of it, like the two instances described above, clearly pointed away from the Mob-did-it theory that Blakey came to advocate. By ignoring the files that Blakey agreed to classify – and that reveal a true conspiracy and cover-up in the JFK case – the show can avoid asking Blakey two questions: 1.) Why did you do it?, and 2.) What was hidden?

Let's go to the next cultivator of cover-up. What can one say about Posner? Except the obvious. His discredited book, Case Closed, was designed to detract from the creation of the ARRB and to counteract the gale impact of Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK. And we have this from the horse's mouth so to speak. (Although, with Posner, I would use a different pack animal's name.) After Jim Marrs debated Posner on the Kevin McCarthy show in Dallas, he asked him how he came to do the book. Posner told him that the project was brought to him by longtime CIA crony Bob Loomis, the backer of such compromised "investigative" reporters as James Phelan and Seymour Hersh. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 369) Posner's book was and is an embarrassment today. One reason being that it relies so much on both the evidence in and the claims of the Warren Report. It also tried to uphold the unsustainable Single Bullet Theory, which today – with the discoveries of Gary Aguilar, Josiah Thompson and John Hunt – is simply not possible to do. (ibid, p. 284) Finally, as more than one commentator has pointed out-including Aguilar-there is a serious question about whether or not Posner actually talked to the people he said he interviewed. Because at least three of them say they don't recall the conversations.

Here is a writer who made the oh so definite statement, on page 428 of the hardcover version of his book, that there was no evidence that David Ferrie knew Lee Oswald. This was right before a Civil Air Patrol picture surfaced depicting both Oswald and Ferrie at an outdoor CAP barbecue. This was also right before the ARRB declassified several statements that CAP members made to the HSCA that they knew Ferrie had met Oswald in their troop. Posner is the same writer who tried to explain the lack of copper on the James Tague bullet curb strike in Dealey Plaza like this: See, the bullet went through the branches of an oak tree and the branches sheared off the copper jacket as the bullet passed through. To anyone who has seen said bullets, this is nothing but balderdash. Posner's phony book was nothing but a PR counter by Bob Loomis. Final proof: the book went on sale the same week the ARRB declassified its first batch of JFK assassination files.

Which brings us to the third member of this circle, Lamar Waldron. Here is a guy who wrote two books trying to sell the idea that Kennedy was preparing for an invasion of Cuba in the first week of December 1963. That the Mafia found out about it, and that they then arranged for his death since they knew that the security about this plan would guarantee a cover up of what they did. Except that in all the years since, there has never been any evidence that this was a cause of the JFK cover up. Today, we have literally thousands upon thousands of pages of FBI, CIA, State Department, Warren Commission, and HSCA declassified files. None of them indicate this is the case. So Waldron now sells another talking point: See, there are files the ARRB did not get, and it must be in there someplace.

The problem with that is what Bill Davy revealed on this web site. Waldron misrepresents the very title of those plans. The title is not, as he says, "Plan for a Coup in Cuba." The full and proper title is "State-Defense Contingency Plan for a Coup in Cuba." With that proper title in mind, a natural question arises: What would be the national security need to tell the Warren Commission about a contingency plan? None that I can imagine. Which is why in the now declassified executive session hearings of the Commission, you will not read one reference to them. Neither it is mentioned in any communication between J. Edgar Hoover and the Commission that I have seen.

Waldron and his co-author Thom Hartmann had further difficulty deciding on how to sell the so-called "coup leader" on the island of Cuba. This is the guy who was supposed to kill Castro, blame it on the Russians and then convince the Cuban public that a band of former Batista followers from the CIA would continue Castro's revolution. In their first go round, called Ultimate Sacrifice, they strongly hinted the leader was Che Guevara. When people like David Talbot pointed out how ridiculous this was, the coup leader was changed to Commander Juan Almeida. Yet, one of the since declassified CIA files reveals a serious problem with their replacement choice for coup leader. According to a National Security Agency intercept, Almeida was not on the island at the time of the alleged coup. He was on his way to Africa. Can one get any more preposterous than this? Think of it all: Castro was going to be murdered, the blame had to be placed on the Soviets, there was going to be a flotilla of Cuban exiles boating to Cuba. And the necessity of holding this explosive situation together was with a guy who wasn't there. When someone pointed this out to Waldron, he was momentarily shaken. But only momentarily. His self-admitted CIA associated co-author Hartmann must have bucked him up with: "Well, we already wrote two books, we can't admit we were wrong now." They continued on this path even when former military officer and guardian of the plans Ed Sherry revealed the following: JFK was so uncomfortable with the contingency plans that he cancelled them.

In the face of all this these two still insist on the efficacy of this downtrodden idea. Today they must remind us of the likes of David Belin and Wesley Liebeler upholding the Warren Commission after it was thoroughly discredited.

As I wrote in my reviews of both the Hartmann/Waldron farces, once the coup idea is done away with – which it is today – the two books are nothing but pretenses for still another discredited idea: the concept that the Cosa Nostra alone killed President Kennedy. There has never been any volume that argued this theory convincingly: not by Dan Moldea, David Scheim, John Davis, Blakey, and certainly not Frank Ragano. What these two poseurs did was to throw them all of them into a Waring blender together. Twice. As I showed in my two reviews (click here and here), it still did not work.

If the idea behind the show was to give us a three headed hydra even worse than Gary Mack, then they may have done it.

But the ideas of the three men do not coincide. Posner is an Oswald as demented Marxist man. To my knowledge, Robert Blakey has never said one word about the Waldron/Hartmann construct. As Bill Davy noted, in Waldron's latest revision – which may change at any moment – he now says the Kennedy assassin was E. Howard Hunt's friend Bernard Barker. Neither Blakey nor Posner would agree with that. So how did this show work around that serious problem? Let's see.

II

It begins on the wrong foot almost instantly. After introducing the Warren Commission, and saying most people don't believe the Commission today, we cut to Robert Blakey. He says that the Commission conducted what he calls "a shooter investigation." In other words: Who pulled the trigger?

There is one thing Blakey is not, and that is stupid. But I feel about him as I do Allen Dulles: I respect his brains as much I don't the uses to which he puts them. As we shall see, with this statement Blakey tells us two things: 1.) He is doing a limited hangout on the Warren Commission, and 2.) He does this limited hangout because he wants to stick with Oswald as the killer, but impose his own agenda over his alleged act.

The problem with saying the Commission did a "shooter investigation" is that they never looked at anyone else as the shooter. So what kind of investigation was it? One that had Oswald in its sights almost from the beginning. And no matter how much the evidence of Oswald as the assassin did not add up, that is how much the Commission went into denial about it. If the FBI came up with no fingerprints on the rifle, that was no problem. If, after the murder, two women were allegedly on the same stairs with Oswald, but did not see him or hear him, that was no problem. If the Commission could not get anyone to match Oswald's shooting exhibition of two head and shoulder hits in six seconds, that wasn't a problem. If the paraffin, spectrographic, and neutron activation analysis all showed Oswald did not fire a rifle that day, that was not a problem. If no credible witness could put Oswald in the proper window in the building, that was no problem. If Oswald never purchased the bullets for the rifle, that was not a problem. If the bullet originally discovered at Parkland Hospital that went through Kennedy and Gov. Connally does not match the bullet in evidence, that is no problem.

The above is what Blakey calls a "shooter investigation". He can get away with this malarkey because the show protects him by not telling the viewer any of the above facts. Which tells us a lot about its honesty.

Right after this, the show shifts to Cuba in the late fifties. It tells us that if there was a conspiracy in the JFK case, it probably came from the conflict there. After depicting the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro, it tells us that Castro decided to clamp down on the Cosa Nostra interests there, which he did. (I should add, this is one of the few accurate, non-debatable statements on this show.)

This accent on Cuba as the sole provenance of President Kennedy's assassination is the cue to bring in Waldron. He begins almost immediately with a misrepresentation as to why the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. He chalks it up to the fact that word of the invasion had leaked too much. This is true but it is not the main reason the invasion failed. In fact, Lyman Kirkpatrick's CIA Inspector General report downplays that as the reason for the failure. (See Bay of Pigs: Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh) If one reads that report closely, one comes to the conclusion that even if the word had not leaked out, even if the invasion had proper air support, even if the landing had been made at a more suitable beach, even if the supply boats had not been damaged, the invasion would have failed. Why?

  1. There was little or no chance of mass uprisings in Cuba (ibid, p. 55)
  2. The logistical advance planning was so poor (ibid, pgs. 83-95) and
  3. The Cuban forces simply overmatched the size and firepower of the invasion force by a huge margin. (ibid, p. 41)

Kirkpatrick's report implicitly says that the invasion could not have succeeded without overt and direct support from the Pentagon. (ibid, pgs. 13-15, p. 146) David Talbot made what was implicit in the report explicit in his book Brothers. He wrote that in 2005 the CIA declassified a memo that showed that they had lied to Kennedy about the operation. As early as November of 1960, the CIA had admitted internally that the objective of holding the beachhead could not be achieved without joint CIA/Pentagon action. (Talbot, pgs. 47-48) Or as Kornbluh told Talbot, "The CIA knew that it couldn't accomplish this type of overt para-military mission without Pentagon participation-and committed that to paper – and then went ahead and tried it anyway." Yet Kennedy was not told about this admission. To put it plainly, the Agency was trying to hoodwink the young president and banked on him caving in to pressure when he saw the invasion collapsing. Did Waldron miss that terribly important point? Probably not. Because elsewhere he admits he read Talbot's book. But since it does not fit his agenda, and in fact detracts from it, he doesn't tell the viewer about it.

Waldron then tells the viewer that the CIA had been working with the Mafia to kill Castro since the summer of 1960. (Actually there is evidence that the plans were in effect as early as 1959, see the 5/23/67 Inspector General Report, p. 9) Posner then chimes in by saying that the CIA does these kinds of things occasionally. That is, signing up with unsavory characters to do ugly jobs. He then adds that this is not surprising. Well Jerry, yes it is. Especially in light of the fact that these plots secretly continued even after the CIA knew that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had declared all out war on the Mafia.

Waldron then adds that RFK's campaign targeted three particular mobsters: Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, and John Roselli. The first two seem accurate enough. But if you look at the chapters dealing with this issue in Arthur Schlesinger's two-volume biography of RFK, Roselli is not mentioned as an RFK target. (Robert Kennedy and His Times, Chapters 8 and 13) In fact, the only instances where Schlesinger mentions Roselli is as a go-between for the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots. This gets distorted in Waldron World presumably to play up a motive for Roselli's alleged later retaliation with Trafficante and Carlos Marcello against the Kennedys.

With the Bay of Pigs and the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro now noted, the show brings in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now everyone knows that this was a great foreign policy highlight of the Kennedy administration. But in Waldron World it really wasn't. Why? Because Waldron pulls out the old chestnut about Castro not allowing on site inspections to be sure the missiles were removed. This has been a canard tossed around by the rightwing since 1962 in order to tarnish Kennedy's triumph. And even encourage an invasion of Cuba. In fact, this never really bothered the Kennedys very much since they realized that aerial reconnaissance would do the job adequately. (Schlesinger, p. 551) What bothered the Kennedys was Castro's insistence on keeping the IL-28 bombers, capable of delivering nuclear weapons. They insisted to their Russian contact, Georgi Bolshakov, that the bombers be removed. And Khrushchev convinced Castro to do so. (ibid, p. 550) And as James Douglass's fine book JFK and the Unspeakable thoroughly documents, it was this diplomatic resolution to the crisis that allowed for a quest for dÈtente between not just Kennedy and Khrushchev, but also one between Kennedy and Castro.

In both of their books, Waldron and Hartmann deliberately distorted this clear and important development at the ending of the Missile Crisis. Why? Because their invasion creation could not live beside it. For why would President Kennedy want to launch an unprovoked attack on Cuba and therefore wreck his quest for dÈtente, which he so eloquently elucidated in his famous American University speech? So with Waldron and Hartmann, Kennedy's back channel to Castro gets discounted. And here it gets substituted for the whole diversion about Castro not allowing on site inspection. Why does reality get upstaged for fiction in Waldron World? Because then you can bring on stage the infamous C-Day Plan. Or the plan for the coup in Cuba. Which, as I said, Waldron and Hartmann misrepresent by leaving out the words "contingency plan".

And this is what this show now does. It brings on the late Enrique Williams. Williams allegedly told Waldron and Hartmann about C-Day before he died. Yet, somehow, in all the hours Williams talked to Bill Turner for his fine volume The Fish is Red (later retitled Deadly Secrets), he never mentioned C-Day once. And as one can tell from reading my review of Legacy of Secrecy, what Waldron and Hartmann posthumously did to Williams' credibility is a real shame. Turner considered him spot on until those two got to him.

III

At this point, Waldron tells us that the Mafia found out about C-Day because it was leaked to them by the likes of Bernard Barker and David Morales. Which is one of the great paradoxes of Waldron World. As one can see from my review of Ultimate Sacrifice, Barker and Ferrie and Jack Ruby somehow knew about C-Day. But people like National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk did not. To preserve its credibility, the show doesn't ask Waldron how that could possibly be.

Bypassing that impossibility, the show says that the Mafia's aim was now to assassinate Kennedy and then use the C-Day Plan to camouflage that murder attempt. Except, as I noted previously, there is no evidence in the millions of declassified pages for this having happened. Waldron then tells us that Dallas was not the first attempt to kill President Kennedy. There were previous Mob attempts to murder him in Chicago and in Tampa. Waldron then says, with a straight face, that the Mafia's models for assassination in these places were all the same. It's just the personages that were different.

The reason I find this risible is that the show then brings on former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden for a few short minutes. Bolden is the agent who tried to tip off the Warren Commission about the plot to kill JFK in Chicago. His is by far the most valuable segment on the program. When I talked to Bolden at the Lancer Conference in Dallas recently, I asked him how many times author Edwin Black interviewed him for his excellent 11/75 Chicago Independent essay on the subject. He said Black talked to him three times and gave him a polygraph examination. Now, as I showed in my review of Ultimate Sacrifice, Waldron and Hartmann did everything they could to keep the reader from reading Black's very important essay. To prevent the reader from finding it, they footnoted Black's essay to a book which had no relation to the subject, and was not even written by Edwin Black! As I mentioned in my review, the perceptible reason for this is that the Waldron World plot has little relation to what Black wrote about. Black did not describe a Mafia plot. What he described clearly outlined a military intelligence type of operation. This did not fit their agenda so the Waldron/Hartmann deliberately disguised their source. (To read the essay Waldron didn't want you to find, click here.)

Waldron next discusses the so-called Tampa murder attempt. The implication being that this somehow resembles Chicago (the plot he tried to disguise) and Dallas. I say "so-called" because, as Bill Davy points out, there is a debate about whether any such attempt actually occurred. Waldron's main source here is one of his posthumous sources, a police chief he said he talked to. As Davy notes, Ken Sanz, a special agent for the state who is both alive and working as a consultant on a book about Trafficante, has never come across any evidence for such an attempt. This is problematic for the Dynamic Duo. In their first tome, Ultimate Sacrifice, they actually tried to use the hoary Joseph Milteer episode as their pretense for a Tampa plot. This is difficult because other authors who have analyzed the Milteer evidence – Henry Hurt, Tony Summers, Michael Benson – have concluded that it is difficult to specify any city for a location Milteer is discussing. But if you had to underline one, it would be Miami, not Tampa. The other problem is that Milteer was a southern racist, not a Mafiosi. In Ultimate Sacrifice, the Waldron/Hartmann Dynamic Duo used their usual nonsensical Six Degrees of Separation method. Roughly speaking, they pulled names out of a hat to connect Milteer with the Mob. Yet this program lets Waldron get away with this "Tampa plot", and proclaim its resemblance to Chicago and Dallas.

Posner chimes in again at this point. He tries to say that there is only a superficial similarity between Chicago and Dallas. That you cannot specifically link Oswald to Chicago. Which, as is standard for this show, makes no sense, since that is not the point. The real point is this: the patsy chosen for Chicago, was a man named Thomas Vallee. As Edwin Black makes clear, Valle had several similarities to Oswald. (See Black, pgs. 5,6, 31) In addition, he worked in a tall building which was right along the motorcade route that Kennedy was supposed to traverse on his Chicago trip. As for a direct linkage, actually there is one, which Black revealed. Yet, the Dynamic Duo, with Black's article in front of them, tried to hide it. The original FBI informant who tipped off the Secret Service about the assassination plot in Chicago had the codename of "Lee". (Black, p 5) Posner couldn't bring himself to say that. And neither could anyone on this show. Which tells you a lot about its objectivity, honesty, and quality of research.

But the program then gets worse. It actually lets Waldron drone on about President Kennedy's speech in Miami on November 18th. Waldron repeats what he and Hartman wrote in Ultimate Sacrifice: that a small part of the speech was a message to Almeida about the C-Day plot being ongoing. Which is absolute silliness on the surface. This guy is going to be running a coup attempt in 12 days in Cuba, and you have to encourage him to stay involved by talking to him in a speech from Miami? Maybe JFK was trying to tell him not to go to Africa?

But it's even worse than that. In Ultimate Sacrifice, the Dynamic Duo admitted that supposedly only Arthur Schlesinger and Dick Goodwin worked on the speech. So what they did was they used Seymour Hersh's pile of rubbish, The Dark Side of Camelot, to say that CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald had a minor hand in inserting a paragraph into the speech. But they gave no page number in Hersh's book as a reference for this. As in their subterfuge with Edwin Black, this was another trick by the Dynamic Duo. Because when you find the material in Hersh you will see that he is not even talking about the same speech. (p. 440) He is referring to a talk Kennedy did in Palm Beach ten days earlier. Further, Hersh sold his particular version of the CIA insertion as a message not to Almeida, but to CIA agent Rolando Cubela as part of an assassination attempt on Castro. Somehow, the producers of this show never asked Waldron to explain this huge discrepancy before he talked about it on the air.

IV

At this juncture, the program turns slightly away from Waldron and Hartmann. The major talking head in the last segment is Blakey. It's easy to understand why. This last part will deal with the actual assassination. In their particular disinfo strain, Waldron and Hartmann postulate someone other than Oswald as the assassin. In his disinfo strain, Blakey doesn't. So what this show concludes with is the scenario that Blakey has been selling since the late seventies, right after he closed down his spectacularly disappointing congressional inquiry. Blakey says Oswald was the assassin, but he did it as an agent of the Cosa Nostra. Specifically for Trafficante and Marcello. But this show even curtails that. Because the HSCA ultimately concluded that in addition to the Texas School Book Depository, there was a shot from the picket fence, which missed. Blakey does not discuss that here. (Dr. Cyril Wecht is brought on to talk about his interpretation of the Zapruder film and how it indicates two assassins, but this is not followed up on. He is left hanging out there almost like he's from a different show.)

Blakey begins this segment by saying if the Cosa Nostra was going to try and kill President Kennedy they would do it with someone who would not be easily or directly related to them. They had the motive to kill JFK since he and his brother were helming a war on organized crime. The show then notes that both Roselli and Sam Giancana were murdered in 1975 and 1976. Incredibly, Waldron now chimes in and says that a famous Marcello adage was " Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." Which is ridiculous even for Waldron and this show. The implication that Marcello would or could have Giancana and Roselli knocked off is silly. A decision like that could be made only at the highest level of organized crime-if that is how it happened at all. As I noted in my review of Ultimate Sacrifice, Marcello was never considered in that stratosphere. He has been aggrandized into that stature by those writers, like John Davis, who have tried to make him into the main driving force behind the JFK murder.

Now the show brings in Jack Van Laningham. This is the FBI informant who talked to Marcello toward the end of his life when he was in prison. Laningham was in jail on an armed robbery charge. He was told his sentence could be lessened if he turned informant. According to Laningham, Marcello told him that he had JFK killed. And that Ruby and Oswald worked for him in that caper.

After watching some forty minutes of this witless farrago, I was not really surprised that they stooped to this. For those who read my review of Legacy of Secrecy, you will understand why this is all so specious. As I explained there, although the Dynamic Duo trumpeted the Laningham surveillance as a great discovery they had uncovered, it was anything but. In 2007, Vince Bugliosi discussed it in Reclaiming History. Before that, researcher Peter Vea had sent me the documents in the late nineties. Peter and I had put together the materials with the obituary notices about Marcello and concluded that the mobster was suffering from Alzheimer's disease at the time he talked to Laningham. Somehow, the producers of this show couldn't figure that out. So when Laningham asks why Marcello was not arrested for what he said to him, my reply is: And do what, send him to a mental asylum? There is no real treatment for Alzheimer's anyway.

It's appropriate though that the show intercuts Laningham with Blakey near the end. Because Blakey's theory could only be endorsed by a guy with Alzheimer's. Blakey says that Oswald was recruited by Cubans who were operating under a false flag: They approached him posing as Marxists, but they were really working for the Cosa Nostra. (Wisely, Blakey does not tell us who those Cubans were.) So the show's implication is that the Mafia picked Oswald to kill Kennedy for them. No one asks Blakey the obvious question: Why would the Mob pick a presidential assassin who was such a lousy shot? Would you pick a guy who not only was a lousy shot but who would use a cheap manual bolt-action rifle to do the job? Another question: Who were the Cubans who controlled Oswald in Dallas? And if they were controlling him for the Mafia, wouldn't they steer him toward at least using a professional rifle?

Blakey then says that Oswald realized he had been duped when famous leftist lawyer John Abt did not get back to him while he was in jail. But the reason Abt did not get back to Oswald was because he wasn't in his office, he was out of the city on a weekend getaway.

At the end Waldron says that Trafficante toasted JFK's death that weekend. This is from Frank Ragano's rather late rendition – by about thirty years – of what happened. As I explained in my Ultimate Sacrifice review, Ragano has about as much credibility on this subject as Posner or Blakey. Waldron also says that RFK came to believe that Marcello had killed JFK and that the AG was part of the cover up. This is more obfuscation by the Dynamic Duo. As Talbot's book shows, Bobby Kennedy never came to a definite conclusion about who killed his brother. And if Waldron and Hartmann can show me how RFK participated in the Warren Commission cover up, I wish he would show me. He and Hartmann had almost 2,000 pages to do so in their two books. They didn't. (Hartmann makes an appearance on the show, probably because the producers could not get anyone else to vouch for Waldron's goofy theory. He comes off with all the slickness and credibility of a snake oil salesman.)

As I said at the start, this show aired right before Gary Mack's latest fiasco, JFK: The Ruby Connection. (For that review, see here.) So, by putting together a show that says Oswald killed JFK for the Mafia, and then running a show that says Ruby had absolutely no help in killing Oswald, what is the underlying message? Oswald might have killed JFK for the Mafia, but that is the length and breadth of any possible conspiracy. And since upon inquiry or analysis, this idea falls apart, what is the real aim of the two shows? In my view it is to extend the confusion and cover-up about he true circumstances of President Kennedy's death.

Consider this: In the three programs that Discovery Channel has broadcast in the last two years – Inside the Target Car, and these two – what has been the amount of declassified ARRB documents that they have used or shown us? Of about two million pages, we have seen almost none. And the ones Discovery Channel has shown are the misrepresented ones that deal with Waldron's discredited theory. As Bill Kelly and John Simkin have pointed out, like Gus Russo, Waldron and Hartmann have become the MSM's new go-to guys for the Kennedy cover-up. A job they seem all too willing to perform. As many have pointed out, including Jim Garrison, the actual perpetrators had given us a series of False Sponsors to cover their tracks. The first was Oswald, the second was Castro, and the third was the Cosa Nostra. Of late, Gus Russo specializes in proffering Castro. Waldron and Hartmann give us the Cosa Nostra, sexed up with a non-existent Coup Plan. A plan in which the coup leader wasn't even in town to run the coup.

In combination, it's evident that these three shows reveal a rather unwelcome truth. That is, today's cable TV companies are just as psychologically and socially incapable of telling the truth about President Kennedy's death as the networks were in the sixties and seventies. In fact, what they are doing amounts to a smelly cover-up. In light of that fact, its better that no programs be broadcast on this subject than those as bad as this one.

Last modified on Wednesday, 02 November 2016 04:11
James DiEugenio

One of the most respected researchers and writers on the political assassinations of the 1960s, Jim DiEugenio is the author of two books, Destiny Betrayed (1992/2012) and The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today (2018), co-author of The Assassinations, and co-edited Probe Magazine (1993-2000).   See "About Us" for a fuller bio.

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