DiEugenio exposes Caro

[Jim DiEugenio]

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/07/28/car...lbjs-rise/


Well BOb, someone knew what you were up to.

And wouldn't let you get away with it. You thief.

[Phil Dragoo]

*(apologies to Christopher Hitchens)

Smashing pumpkins which have begun to sag from internal rot

But beyond that, some of the books Caro chose for his information on the Kennedy administration are surprising. Are we really to believe that the celebrated author could find time to read The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz but he couldn't find time to read JFK: Ordeal in Africa by Richard Mahoney?

That somehow Caro thought it was important to read Seymour Hersh's discredited The Dark Side of Camelot, but it wasn't important to read John Newman's milestone work, JFK and Vietnam? With these choices made, one can see why Caro's discussion of the Kennedy administration, although longer, is no more sophisticated or nuanced than the work of Chris Matthews. [See Consortiumnews.com's ["Why Mr. Hardball Found JFK Elusive."]




The overarching irony of Caro missing JFK's earthshaking withdrawal has no mythic equal since Mr. Magoo voiced by Jim Backus
Caro presents the stereotypic two-dimensional JFK, a failing Donald Gibson treats first in Battling Wall Street: The JFK Presidency.

~~~

If there is a tragic arc from 1960-68, and there is, then that is the story line to hew to: How Johnson took a country at relative peace and great prosperity and drove it into war, economic stagflation and race riots. But you won't find it here.



War on poverty, Medicare, Great Society (buying votes): six trillion dollars
A war on the other side of the world dropping more tonnage than all previous wars: 58,000 Americans, two million Vietnamese, a billion dollars a week
Appointing Helms DCI, dropping out of the '68 race to pass the baton to Nixon over the bodies of King and RFK--priceless

~~~

Further, Caro states that because of the overthrow of Diem, Kennedy may have later altered his view of the withdrawal plan. He fails to note that in reply to a press conference question of Nov. 12, which was after Diem's overthrow, Kennedy said his goal "was to bring Americans home." (Newman, p. 426) And there is no evidence in the record that Kennedy changed his mind on this issue prior to his death.

http://jfk-press-conferences.blogspot.co...-1963.html

JFK PRESS CONFERENCE #64
(NOVEMBER 14, 1963)

The question between 7:40 and 8:45 contains the phrasing re bring them home twice around the 8:24 mark.

QED Caro presents as Noam Chomsky, Chris Matthews, and every other shill insisting there's no difference between complete withdrawal by 1965 and a half million in-country with over a tenth of that in body bags for nothing, for less than nothing, for so much less than nothing as to be the black hole of the Republicwhich opened in Dealey Plaza balistically

~~~

But yet, if one believes Caro, after finding out about Allen Dulles's duplicity in the Bay of Pigs, and being so repulsed by it that he wanted no member of the Dulles family in the administration, we are to believe that RFK asked Johnson to appoint Dulles to investigate the suspicious death of his brother. Add to that the fact, as David Talbot notes, that Bobby first suspected that the CIA had killed JFK. (Brothers, pgs. 6-7)

To pile a howler onto all this, Caro writes that Operation Mongoose was still operative on Nov. 22, 1963, with RFK in charge. In fact, Mongoose had been disbanded after the Missile Crisis, many months before the assassination. (Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution, p. 151)

Here Caro presents as Lamar Waldron.

Even though RFK suspected CIA in the hit on JFK he wants its old boss to investigate the hit. Lamar Caro is a genius

And Mongoose run by RFK at the time of the hit on JFKCaro has some really, really, really inside sourcesprobably an auto-colonoscopy

~~~

With what Caro does here, I don't look forward to the final volume. Now that I have seen him operate close up, he reminds me of the likes of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough. That is, historians who worship success more than the truth.

Caro is in the tradition of Doris Kearns who got twuly groupie at the sight of the hunka-hunka burning Texan, and David Beschloss who panting pronounced the current shill's I.Q. to be "off the charts" (though untested off the teleprompter).

Caro's Flawed Tale of LBJ's Rise is a typically thorough and considered review.

Caro's latest bottle is an overhyped, fatally-flawed beatification of an unscrupulous political beast clomping over the last thoughtful reformer of all policies foreign and domestic.



An opus hypus
on whom you will not hear a laugh
except inside the gates of ctkaDPF

[Jim DiEugenio]

Thanks Phil.

I was really kind of shocked at how bad this book was.

The guy spent ten years writing it, and somehow he didn't get to NARA II? With 2 million pages of declassified documents there. He didn't even read the Taylor Report with RFK going after Dulles like a bouncer? He didn't even read FRUS, which shows MONGOOSE was terminated after the Missile Crisis? ANd he calls NSAM 263 "tentative" when it was in the works for almost two years?

And he couldn't tell his readers about LBJ's role, at the very least, in the cover up? Which is undeniable today by any objective person.

What a piece of crap. THere is no reason to lie this far down the line. One of these days this country is going to have to face the facts. You cannot with a worthless sell out as a popular historian.

[Phil Dragoo]

Foreign Relations of the United States, 19611963
Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, Document 217

---

217. Memorandum for the Record[SUP]Source[/SUP]

Washington, November 29, 1962, 10 a.m.

• SUBJECT
  
• Executive Committee of NSC Meeting10:00 a.m.29 November
  
• All Present
  

The President left the meeting.


There followed a brief discussion of the Mongoose program. DCI stated he felt future activity should be restricted to intelligence gathering but this should be carried on in a most intense manner and that CIA was prepared to present an operational plan which would involve refugee interrogation at Opa Laka, [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] and elsewhere, and an intense program with infiltrated agents, the use of Cuban in-place defectors and very active operation with third country liaison. It was decided that Mr. Helms should present this program at the earliest moment and DCI was asked to call the meeting.


DCI also stated that the form of Mongoose organization should be modified and this was agreed, but no new organization form was discussed.


John A. McCone[SUP]7[/SUP]
Director

[URL="http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v11/d217"]http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v11/d217

[/URL]

[Albert Doyle]

Jim's review is so thorough and well-timed that it invokes a speech-maker who has delivered such a perfect response, followed by a pause, followed by single claps that then erupt into grand applause. I'm sure most in this room feel that way whether they posted or not. Like with Reclaiming History more is learned about the book from Jim's review than the actual book itself.


As for Caro, the unspeakable once again remains unspoken.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Thanks for that quote Phil.

BTW, you will see when my book is published that by the second half of 1963, there was veritably nothing left of the covert efforts against Cuba. Kennedy was much more interested in the back channel.

Thanks ALbert.

I hope people start sending this to Caro's web site. The guy needs to take a cold shower and then see his shrink.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Caro has a web site:

http://www.robertcaro.com/


Let us start sending him links to my review of his bad and chicken hearted book.

[Albert Doyle]

It disgusts me to see the entity Colby trying to say NSAM 111 proved Kennedy was a war hawk on VietNam. Douglass more or less shows NSAM 111 was Kennedy's way of placating the right post-Bay Of Pigs and prior to the Missile Crisis. The only reason was to bide time for the planning of a Laos-like neutralization pact and negotiations. Colby is a liar who tries to pose a reluctant stop-gap measure as intent.

[Seamus Coogan]

Good article Jim stunning what Caro left out.

[Albert Doyle]

I think it's obvious that Kennedy's Sept 1963 statement to David Brinkley that South VietNam was prone to the domino theory and must be held to stop the tide in Southeast Asia was his way of placating the right while doing back-channel negotiations with Khrushchev that would have prevented the need for any last stand in VietNam. Obviously JFK thought that defusing the Cold War was a better solution than hopeless war in VietNam. In fact this public endorsement of holding VietNam while privately making moves for negotiation and NSAM 263 withdrawal was perfect evidence that the right-wingers and war-mongers in power thought Kennedy betrayed them and was therefore legally executable as a "traitor". It all makes perfect sense in this context.

Don't look at what Kennedy says, look at what he does. What he did was withdrawal.