Nelson's LBJ Mastermind book

[James H. Fetzer]

Has Josiah Thompson turned you into a brainless buffoon? I say that because the kind of cheap, petty and thoughtless attacks issuing from you now are vintage Tink. Have you given any of this any real thought? For you to become a Thompson clone is sad. Did you miss the memo that, in describing him as "the mastermind", I was not impling that Lyndon was moping the floors or counting the paperclips? Like missing the point that, if they were Bulova officials, they were certainly not acting liking Bulova officials. Perhaps I need to remind you of the nature of complex, compartmentalized covert ops.

I really wonder about your conception of "original research". I went back over Shane's exceptional spade work, reviewed Morley, Talbot, and your earlier work and discovered that the three of you had missed the boat, big time! So I corrected the historical record. Since I was clearly more painstaking and thorough in my assessment of the available evidence than were Morley and Talbot, on the one hand, and you on the other, if I had not taken up the task, other researchers might mistakenly continue to this day to suppose that you and they had done it right.

But you were wrong--all three of you! Since you apparently want to persist in holding beliefs that are false or at least unjustifiable about the CIA at the Ambassador, perhaps my study is even more of a litmus test of our relative research competence than even I had originally surmised. I invite anyone who wants to compare our respective degrees of competence to read "RFK: Outing the CIA at the Ambassador" and to appreciate that, EVEN AFTER I HAVE EXPLAINED HIS MISTAKES IN PRINT, he still persists in clinging to those beliefs.

Another demonstration of his incompetence in research is his wholesale dismissal of what Madeleine, Billy Sol, E. Howard Hunt and even Barr McClellan have to tell us about the character and personality of Lyndon Baines Johnson. They are among those who knew him best. The fact that it may be subtle and complex to fit the pieces together based upon everything else we know about the case, this is a nice example of tossing out the baby with the bathwater, on a par with Chamber's blunder in dismissing the medical evidence because he doesn't understand it.

If anyone thinks the plot could have gone forward without Lyndon's participation, they are kidding themselves. Only he was in the position to guarantee that the government would neither pursue nor punish those who were involved in the assassination. LBJ was much smarter than you, of course, Jim, and even had staged conversations with Edgar, who had trouble following the script. Having Joe Alsop "suggest" a commission was on a par with having one op cite the work of another. It gave him another form of cover.

JIm:

You keep on harping on these hollow shibboleths.

"The plot could not have gone forward without Johnson."

What does this mean?

Precisely what did LBJ have to do with the following:

1.) Oswald being introduced to the Paines by the Baron.
2.) Oswald being manipulated in the New Orleans area by Shaw, Ferrie, and Banister.
3.) Ruth Paine picking up Marina and separating her from Lee and Lee from his possessions at the time of the murder.
4.) The Oswald charade in Mexico City which is crucial to the plot.
5.) Oswald getting his job at the TSBD.
6.) Ruth Paine producing all that phony evidence after the murder
7.) The military curtailing the autopsy

As Don Gibson has proven, it was not even LBJ who thought up the Warren Commission.

ANd BTW, as Joseph Green proved, Nelson does not spell out anything which shows Johnson directly connecting to these groups manipulating Oswald in advance.

Further, what was LBJ's connection to the Chicago Plot? Did you ever think of that one?

Jim, you made a mistake. Man up and admit it.

P. S. And you should not be telling anyone about "trusting people'. Because the people you trusted in that AMbassador episode, and the Regicide farce, ended up blowing up on you.