01-01-2011, 03:30 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-01-2011, 06:03 AM by James H. Fetzer.)
Shameful things are going on at the EF, Lancer, and now the DPF, but they are surely not being committed by me or Phil Nelson. For someone who lacks the least grasp of the character and personality of LBJ, it is simply stunning that Jim DiEugenio continues to peddle tripe about LBJ's involvement in the assassination. If this guy had only understood my PREFACE to Phil's fine rebuttal, he would know more than he evinces here. And if he wants to post his replies to Phil's refutation, let him do so. Instead, he unloads (what I can only describe as) a dump truck of mindless manure on me and on Phil's magnificent book.
Lyndon B. Johnson was the most fascinating character ever to dominate the American political stage. He had an uncanny ability to discern the weaknesses in the personality and values of those he proved capable of manipulating through out his entire career. If this guy had actually read Phil's book, even only the first few chapters, he would not be making such frivolous and falsifiable claims. As John Connally observed, when he was asked to describe LBJ, "That would take every adjective in the dictionary!", because Lyndon had so many strengths both for good and for evil! And he was a political genius.
I used to believe that DiEugenio was a force for good, even though it bothered me that he seemed to understand neither the medical evidence nor the proof of fabrication of the film. In my opinion, those limitations severely restrict his capacity to make informed judgments about other aspects of the case. When he "reviewed" Doug Horne's INSIDE THE ARRB and faulted Doug for praising David Lifton's work, I had to post and ask him if he had actually READ THE BOOK, because the evidence for alteration of the throat wound and of surgery to the head, which Horne substantiates, vindicates Lifton's early research.
And that extends to Horne's extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of multiple entries of multiple caskets into the morgue. To this day DiEugenio does not appear to understand that JFK was ALREADY IN THE MORGUE when the gray Navy ambulance carrying Jackie herself pulled up in front of Bethesda Naval Hospital. As Jerrol Custer explained to Lifton and as he and I discussed it in person, he was headed upstairs in the company of Secret Service agents with X-rays that had been exposed but needed to be developed when he looked out the window and saw the formal entourage arrive. But the autopsy had already begun. Since JFK's body was in the morgue, it cannot also have been in the hearse.
Anyone who thinks that Lyndon Johnson was going to be riding in an open car in the very motorcade in which the only man standing between him and the presidency was going to be assassinated by a cross fire and NOT TAKE CHARGE OF THAT EVENT has lost their grip on reality. As Billy Sol first explained to William Raymond, a French investigative reporter, and later repeated in his book, A TEXAS LEGEND, Lyndon even sent Cliff Carter, his chief administrative assistant to Dallas to make sure that all of the arrangements were in place to effect the transition of governance from JFK to him.
DiEugenio disillusioned me on the old Judyth Vary Baker thread when he attempted to debunk the testimony of Mary Morgan, the daughter of a Louisiana state senator whom Lee Oswald was visiting in a feigned "search for a job", when he suggested that an interview with Mary, decades after she had described a mystery woman who was in the car while Lee was speaking with her father, should carry more weight than her consistent and repeated testimony in the past. I knew then that I was dealing with a person who, even in relation to historical methodology, had diminished understanding.
The next major development in my growing disillusionment with DiEugenio's research competence arose in the course of my inquiry into the conflict over the identification of three officials of the CIA at the Ambassador when Bobby was killed, George Joannides, Gordon Campbell, and David Sanchez Morales. What I discovered was that, even though Jefferson Morley and David Talbot had attempted to debunk them, the evidence supporting Bradley Ayers and Wayne Smith's IDs was actually far stronger than they had represented and the evidence against them far weaker, where DiEugenio was advancing feeble reasons to discount them, as I have explained in "RFK: Outing the CIA at the Ambassador", which I recommend to compare our work.
So he needs to fault Barr McClelland, who actually worked in the office of one of Lyndon's attorneys, who was involved in planning the assassination and the cover up. He also has to debunk the book by Madeleine Duncan Brown, with whom I had over a hundred conversations, and another by Billy Sol Estes, both of whom knew Lyndon as well as anyone possibly could. And of course he also has to extend his blanket dismissals to E. Howard Hunt--and therefore to Jesse Ventura's JFK "Conspiracy Theory" program--for the simple reason that Jesse takes Hunt's confession seriously, which undermines his attempts to deflect and undermine any evidence that implicates LBJ in the crime.
Somewhere DiEugeio acknowledges that Lyndon might have been the ambitious and narcissistic megalomaniac that others, including Phil Nelson, have described, but he would not know because he was never that close to LBJ! That's a remarkable admission for someone who is attempting to trivialize the most important study of this fascinating personality, where Robert Caro's superb series documents those tendencies in spades. And, most importantly, DiEugeio's admitted weakness is the great strength of Madeleine Duncan Brown, Billy Sol Estes, Barr McClelland, and even E. Howard Hunt. They all knew LBJ "up close and personal", none more so than Madeleine Duncan Brown.
If anyone had any doubts about the character of Jim DiEugenio, it is manifest here in his allusion to the difference between my first and second takes about REGICIDE by Gregory Douglas. I found his depiction of the role of James Jesus Angleton ferreting out that JFK had been communicating with Nikita Krushchev so fascinating that I did not initially pay sufficient attention to the alleged Soviet intelligence report about the assassination, which, by a coincidence too incredible to be true, reported that JFK had been taken out where three and only three shots had been fired. Since I already knew the number was actually eight, nine, or ten, I realized something had to be wrong.
So I undertook further analysis of Gregory Douglas, even arranging to meet him for lunch in Chicago. But he never showed up. I reassessed my views about him, for the first time revised a review of a book of mine on amazon.com, and wrote about it in assassinationresearch.com, where you can find my own candid evaluation of what I had been through at http://assassinationresearch.com/v1n2.html . This happened in 2002, however, and has no relevance to understanding LBJ. The very fact that he has now brought up this obscure incident from long ago reminds me of the extremely petty and shallow criticisms that I have had to deal with in the past from Josiah Thompson.
Like almost all of Tink's criticisms, almost all of DiEugenio's are baseless. I have no idea why he would suppose I do not understand the Douglass book. I interviewed Jim Douglass on JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE on 15 April 2009 and Phil Nelson on LBJ: MASTERMIND OF JFK'S ASSASSINATION on 3 September 2010. (The interviews can be found at my program's archives, http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com.) if anyone can find any reason to suspect that I did not understand either book, I would be fascinated to know of it. I have compared their books, because Jim's explains how JFK antagonized the country's most powerful special interests, including the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the Mafia and the banksters, for example, while Phil's book explains what they did about it.
Phil Nelson has objected to DiEugenio's latest trashing of Seymour Hersh, who has to qualify as one of our best, if not our very best, investigative journalists. Not only did Hersh expose the My Lai massacre, which took enormous courage, but he has, more recently, exposed the existence of an executive assassination ring operating out of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, which I addressed in "Has Cheney been Murdering Americans?" While I thought that THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT was a bit excessive about JFK's alleged escapades--since I do not believe he was physically capable of some of these exploits because of his back injuries--this has struck me as the last straw. I agree one of us is a mediocrity, but ask yourself if it's me.
Lyndon B. Johnson was the most fascinating character ever to dominate the American political stage. He had an uncanny ability to discern the weaknesses in the personality and values of those he proved capable of manipulating through out his entire career. If this guy had actually read Phil's book, even only the first few chapters, he would not be making such frivolous and falsifiable claims. As John Connally observed, when he was asked to describe LBJ, "That would take every adjective in the dictionary!", because Lyndon had so many strengths both for good and for evil! And he was a political genius.
I used to believe that DiEugenio was a force for good, even though it bothered me that he seemed to understand neither the medical evidence nor the proof of fabrication of the film. In my opinion, those limitations severely restrict his capacity to make informed judgments about other aspects of the case. When he "reviewed" Doug Horne's INSIDE THE ARRB and faulted Doug for praising David Lifton's work, I had to post and ask him if he had actually READ THE BOOK, because the evidence for alteration of the throat wound and of surgery to the head, which Horne substantiates, vindicates Lifton's early research.
And that extends to Horne's extraordinarily detailed reconstruction of multiple entries of multiple caskets into the morgue. To this day DiEugenio does not appear to understand that JFK was ALREADY IN THE MORGUE when the gray Navy ambulance carrying Jackie herself pulled up in front of Bethesda Naval Hospital. As Jerrol Custer explained to Lifton and as he and I discussed it in person, he was headed upstairs in the company of Secret Service agents with X-rays that had been exposed but needed to be developed when he looked out the window and saw the formal entourage arrive. But the autopsy had already begun. Since JFK's body was in the morgue, it cannot also have been in the hearse.
Anyone who thinks that Lyndon Johnson was going to be riding in an open car in the very motorcade in which the only man standing between him and the presidency was going to be assassinated by a cross fire and NOT TAKE CHARGE OF THAT EVENT has lost their grip on reality. As Billy Sol first explained to William Raymond, a French investigative reporter, and later repeated in his book, A TEXAS LEGEND, Lyndon even sent Cliff Carter, his chief administrative assistant to Dallas to make sure that all of the arrangements were in place to effect the transition of governance from JFK to him.
DiEugenio disillusioned me on the old Judyth Vary Baker thread when he attempted to debunk the testimony of Mary Morgan, the daughter of a Louisiana state senator whom Lee Oswald was visiting in a feigned "search for a job", when he suggested that an interview with Mary, decades after she had described a mystery woman who was in the car while Lee was speaking with her father, should carry more weight than her consistent and repeated testimony in the past. I knew then that I was dealing with a person who, even in relation to historical methodology, had diminished understanding.
The next major development in my growing disillusionment with DiEugenio's research competence arose in the course of my inquiry into the conflict over the identification of three officials of the CIA at the Ambassador when Bobby was killed, George Joannides, Gordon Campbell, and David Sanchez Morales. What I discovered was that, even though Jefferson Morley and David Talbot had attempted to debunk them, the evidence supporting Bradley Ayers and Wayne Smith's IDs was actually far stronger than they had represented and the evidence against them far weaker, where DiEugenio was advancing feeble reasons to discount them, as I have explained in "RFK: Outing the CIA at the Ambassador", which I recommend to compare our work.
So he needs to fault Barr McClelland, who actually worked in the office of one of Lyndon's attorneys, who was involved in planning the assassination and the cover up. He also has to debunk the book by Madeleine Duncan Brown, with whom I had over a hundred conversations, and another by Billy Sol Estes, both of whom knew Lyndon as well as anyone possibly could. And of course he also has to extend his blanket dismissals to E. Howard Hunt--and therefore to Jesse Ventura's JFK "Conspiracy Theory" program--for the simple reason that Jesse takes Hunt's confession seriously, which undermines his attempts to deflect and undermine any evidence that implicates LBJ in the crime.
Somewhere DiEugeio acknowledges that Lyndon might have been the ambitious and narcissistic megalomaniac that others, including Phil Nelson, have described, but he would not know because he was never that close to LBJ! That's a remarkable admission for someone who is attempting to trivialize the most important study of this fascinating personality, where Robert Caro's superb series documents those tendencies in spades. And, most importantly, DiEugeio's admitted weakness is the great strength of Madeleine Duncan Brown, Billy Sol Estes, Barr McClelland, and even E. Howard Hunt. They all knew LBJ "up close and personal", none more so than Madeleine Duncan Brown.
If anyone had any doubts about the character of Jim DiEugenio, it is manifest here in his allusion to the difference between my first and second takes about REGICIDE by Gregory Douglas. I found his depiction of the role of James Jesus Angleton ferreting out that JFK had been communicating with Nikita Krushchev so fascinating that I did not initially pay sufficient attention to the alleged Soviet intelligence report about the assassination, which, by a coincidence too incredible to be true, reported that JFK had been taken out where three and only three shots had been fired. Since I already knew the number was actually eight, nine, or ten, I realized something had to be wrong.
So I undertook further analysis of Gregory Douglas, even arranging to meet him for lunch in Chicago. But he never showed up. I reassessed my views about him, for the first time revised a review of a book of mine on amazon.com, and wrote about it in assassinationresearch.com, where you can find my own candid evaluation of what I had been through at http://assassinationresearch.com/v1n2.html . This happened in 2002, however, and has no relevance to understanding LBJ. The very fact that he has now brought up this obscure incident from long ago reminds me of the extremely petty and shallow criticisms that I have had to deal with in the past from Josiah Thompson.
Like almost all of Tink's criticisms, almost all of DiEugenio's are baseless. I have no idea why he would suppose I do not understand the Douglass book. I interviewed Jim Douglass on JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE on 15 April 2009 and Phil Nelson on LBJ: MASTERMIND OF JFK'S ASSASSINATION on 3 September 2010. (The interviews can be found at my program's archives, http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com.) if anyone can find any reason to suspect that I did not understand either book, I would be fascinated to know of it. I have compared their books, because Jim's explains how JFK antagonized the country's most powerful special interests, including the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the Mafia and the banksters, for example, while Phil's book explains what they did about it.
Phil Nelson has objected to DiEugenio's latest trashing of Seymour Hersh, who has to qualify as one of our best, if not our very best, investigative journalists. Not only did Hersh expose the My Lai massacre, which took enormous courage, but he has, more recently, exposed the existence of an executive assassination ring operating out of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, which I addressed in "Has Cheney been Murdering Americans?" While I thought that THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT was a bit excessive about JFK's alleged escapades--since I do not believe he was physically capable of some of these exploits because of his back injuries--this has struck me as the last straw. I agree one of us is a mediocrity, but ask yourself if it's me.
Jim DiEugenio Wrote:Now, in fairness to myself and Green, will Fetzer now post the replies by myself and Green to this post by Nelson?
Or if he cannot get them since Spartacus is down, will he
at least acknowledge they are there?
No he will not. Why? Because Fetzer made one of his many huge misjudgments, almost as bad as endorsing Gregory Douglas' piece of forgery when he interviewed Nelson about this book. He actually called it the "JFK and the Unpseakable" of the LBJ field.
Which of course means that 1.) Fetzer does not know why Douglass' book is so important, 2.) He does not really understand who Kennedy was, and 3.) He sure as heck does not understand who LBJ was. It would be impossible to write such a book about LBJ since he had no degree of sophistication about foreign policy, nowhere near what JFK had. Therefore, there could be no Julius Ceasar style plot against him. Further, Douglass would never stoop to using sources like Hersh and McClellan in his book. Nelson does.
COncerning Nelson's point about Valentine's book, apparently Nelson never read Hersh's first book on My Lai, which predates the articles he notes. I did. In that book, he maintains a government cover up about what happened. As the months wore on, and it became obvious that Calley and the higher ups were being protected by the military and Nixon, even a stooge like Hersh understood the cover up could not be maintained.
He then ignores the other two areas I pointed out about the stooge Hersh ie. Watergate and the fact "The Dark Side of Camelot" was a put up job as a reaction to Stone's film. He also did not point out the three pieces of journalistic falsehoods I pointed out in Hersh's book which show it was a hatchet job.
Fetzer, forever the polemicist, left those out. I would also. Somehow Fetzer ignored the facts that Nelson borrowed liberally from not just CIA slut Hersh, but the fabricating Barr McClellan.
Fetzer is too busy proving Zapruder did not take the Z film to notice faults in scholarship like that. Or else he never read my discussions of both books.
Shame on you Jim.