Fred Lee Crisman

[Helen Reyes]

Seriously, while the JFK assassination drama may incorporate potboiler elements, it is in fact far more serious and accomplished than most genre fiction. (Are you aware that, when asked why he never examined the events of 11/22/63 in his fiction, John Le Carre noted that it would be "too difficult"?) Its mythic structures are worthy of Joseph Campbell, its characterizations are profoundly indebted to Shakespeare (Ruby as Falstaff? Angel and Leopoldo as Rozencrantz and Guildenstern? For starters?).

And of keenest interest to me are its uses of doppelganger elements -- characters and incidents, from two (at least) LHOs to multiple plots (Chicago, Miami, Dallas).

The literary pretensions of Messrs. Phillips, Hunt, and Shaw are well documented, as are the poetic inclinations of Jay Jay Angleton.

Dallas was a Passion play.

And still we come to that city to make the Stations of the Crossfire.

You're right of course. It's more complicated than most pulps, but shares a certain kind of ambition. I'm not well versed in Shakespeare, or the Assassination Plot for that matter.

Was Angleton the counter-intel guy at CIA who turned out to be the Soviet mole himself? I can't keep them all straight. On a side note, Harriman was a US ambassador during WWII and cut a deal with Stalin for a Jewish homeland in the USSR, in Crimea. Wild Bill Donovan supposedly had good contacts in the NKVD (they probably considered him a foolish Amerian cowboy type) and after the third attempt on Patton wasn't a charm, supposedly had the NKVD send in a man to rub him out in his hospital bed. Funny how the OSS played it when they became CIA: they renounced Soviet friendship and claimed Roosevelt's administration left Truman with a bunch of Soviet spies in high offices.

Sort of reminds me of the old idea of a Communist under cover denouncing political opponents as Communists knowing full well they are not. It doesn't matter how they're denounced, as long as a Party man remains in factual control of the situation. Not that Communist has any meaning in real life.

Interesting that Bush was head of the CIA and became president at the same time Gorbachev, former KGB head, was secretary general, especially keeping mind Kennedy and Krushchev were removed from office within about a year of each other. Interesting as well that all the "revolutions" in Eastern Europe were top-down, on Gorby's command via telephone usually. Even those with the most versimilitude, Romania and Lithuania, were staged, in Romania by military leaders with a preexisting coup plan, in Lithuania by deep cover KGB posing as national leaders.

I know these topics are separate threads elsewhere on the forum, but Crisman seems as good a moment as any to tie them together a bit.