How Gary Mack became Dan Rather ( Jim Di Eugenio)

[Paul Rigby]

Jim's response:
" The issue of Z film alteration does not figure in any way, shape or form into this essay or the section of it you allude to. My point, which I thought was obvious, was that the Sixth Floor was covering up for the real motivations of Henry Luce and C. D. Jackson. Which I think I proved. And which figures into the main theme of the essay i.e. that Gary Mack has now joined into something he once vociferously opposed. Which is why I used the opening quote I did. And he has now become a central part of the cover up. Along with other people who used to be "critics" like Gus Russo and Dale Myers. The question the essay poses and argues for is that this may have been a part of a grand plan which no one saw at the time, including me. To my knowledge this is the first sustained inquiry into that topic. And it took two months of interviews to assemble it. That was the main theme--period. And that is big and important enough. It should not be criticized for something extraneous to it.


I leave the issue of Z film alteration to those who wish to argue about it rather inelegantly but zealously. I have never taken part in that debate. I have done my best on other matters like Jim Garrison, JFK and Vietnam, the media, Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, and exposing things like Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann's ludicrous books and this Discovery Channel fiasco. I leave the Z film debate to others who are more qualified and interested in it. I have other fish to fry. I think I do a good job cooking them. And I don't think I should be taken to task for choosing to fight those battles and not this one."


Thanks again.


JIM D".

Jim,

Thanks for the reply. I must say, however, that I remainly deeply puzzled and not a little troubled by your essay, specifically, section VI.

The Sixth Form Museum is now the official HQ of the Department of Zapruderland Security, the custodian of the alleged camera-original. Incredibly, you entirely ignore this, the most salient fact of the Museum’s current incarnation, in the section of your essay at issue: Why?

To put it another way, if Mack is indeed the CIA-handled disinformationist you describe – and I disagree with you here only about the timing – what does this tell us about the film? Why would the best, truly authentic film record of the assassination require guarding by a figure like Mack, not to mention the network of anti-alterationist glove-puppets he animates?

Even more curiously, you embrace and reproduce the same basic history of the film, its provenance and acquisition, that is peddled by, guess who, Gary Mack and the Sixth Form Museum. Indeed, the latter’s website is more accurate: It at least nods in the direction of the oft-ignored fact that the version of the Z-fake with which, courtesy of Garrison’s subpoena, we are today familiar first debuted on a Los Angeles channel in February 1969. Oddly, it did so without recrimination from Time-Life, into whose iron Lucean-Jacksonian grip you would have us believe it originally and uncomplicatedly fell in November 1963 until March 1975.

Are you quite sure it did?

Paul