Nelson's LBJ Mastermind book

[Alan Dale]

Hello Professor Fetzer,

Thank you for all you've contributed to our search for deeper understanding of President Kennedy's assassination. I respect your devotion to illuminating the many related mysteries of what I consider to be the most consequential crime of our time.
I'm especially grateful to you for helping to introduce the important work of Dr. David Mantik, whose innovative analysis of President Kennedy's skull x-rays I find particularly compelling.

Because I'm new to this community, and because you express some curiosity about whether an affiliation may exist between my thought processes and Jim DiEugenio, (whom I do not know), I'll offer a brief synopsis of my current thinking on the big question and allow you judge if there are similarities in methodology.

I was born in December of 1959. My parents were great admirers of the Kennedy brothers. At different times during my early childhood they participated as volunteers for the democratic party and, in 1968, as campaign workers for Robert F. Kennedy. At an event in New Albany, Indiana I was introduced to Senator Kennedy. I was six years old. I don't believe anything I've experienced has meant more to me than that.

It took several years for me to understand why my parents and so many others were so devastated by those assassinations. I've learned that the answer to that question may be found in how those men lived, and in what they inspired in the hearts of young parents who cherished their children's futures.

So, with hat in hand...slightly, I will offer you the following:

My slightly less vague than it used to be belief, (similar, but not identical, to what I imagine religious Faith to be like), is that two Cold Warriors at the heart of CIA, employing resources and operations which were already at hand in paramilitary and counterintelligence programs ostensibly directed against Castro, orchestrated several compartmentalized conspiracies from which a coordinated physical attack upon President Kennedy, (arranged by William King Harvey), and a diabolically clever incrimination of the sadly disposable low-level asset, Lee Harvey Oswald, (arranged by James J. Angleton), made news that altered History.

For me, personally, it's taken literally decades of awareness and suspicions about the two men I've named, James J. Angleton and William K. Harvey, to have evolved into an hypothesis that they alone in their respective areas of expertise, action and influence, at both the absolute most compartmentalized center and the ultimate peak of clandestine authority over our nation's mechanisms of counterintelligence, collaborated with each other on the two vital areas of the crime: Killing President Kennedy and setting up Oswald in such a way that his incrimination caused alarm bells to go off throughout the entire infrastructure of our Defense/Intelligence establishment.

Some of the black and white is hidden inside the dense materials released through the ARRB. Like everything associated with this event, those materials are subject to interpretation. Fortunately, there are a few military intelligence scholars who are qualified to interpret those documents. There will never be proof that Angleton conceived the plan and Harvey managed its execution. But we do have enough, for the first time in the history of these investigations, to follow a paper trail and read between the lines, just exactly as any serious criminologist would intend. That paper trail raises what I believe is the most elegant lead we've ever had in these investigations: Who had the authority to alter how information about Oswald was kept at CIA HQS prior to the assassination?

Much of the rest depends upon sifting through the literally thousands of figures associated not merely with the crime of the century, but with the context of the history which was being made during that time. The person who personally managed the CIA's executive action program, who hated the Kennedy's "...with a purple passion", who developed a close professional and personal relationship with infamous Mafia executives, who controlled and dispensed unauthorized anti-Castro guerrilla teams at a time when any such provocations were dangerous and destabilizing to the the authority of our government's executive branch, and whose career was effectively ended by the stroke of a pen set in the hand of the 37 year old Attorney General of the United States is, in my opinion, not a completely unjustifiable suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy.

And, I can't prove it at all. But, since I'm new here, this is as good a time as any to express what I believe.

That's what I believe.

With regard to your questions about the witnesses I doubt, I don't believe them.

Christopher Hitchens has stated, "I try to sharpen my practice of Reason, Doubt, Skepticism, the weighing of argument against evidence and of evidence against interest. In other words, I'm more inclined to doubt something if its truth would be something that would suit me".

I would be open to any testimony of any eye witness whose story was told on the day of the event, and which was not embellished over a period of decades to become something much more sensational than it was originally.

Very simply, I don't believe any person whose story of what they saw emerged at some point after their initial interviews on the subject.

I believe witnesses like Charles Brehm and Mary Moorman, who described what they saw...and what they didn't see. I do not believe either witnesses whose presence is documented but who later embellished their original descriptions of what they saw, or self-proclaimed and self-promoted witnesses who "went public" with dramatic and sensational claims.

The people who were near the president's limousine at the time of the shooting were eye-witnesses to the biggest and most consequential event of their lives. Some people can't handle that. In a way, I feel it's like winning the lottery; Whatever weaknesses, vulnerabilities, character flaws that a person might have become magnified.

That's part of what I think I know.

I'm happy to make your acquaintance.