Conspiracy theories, radicalization, and the death of a president

On 22 November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. A revolutionary zealot and a committed communist, Oswald’s journey to violent radicalization began when he was handed a “Save the Rosenbergs” pamphlet in New York City.

The first instance we have of Lee Harvey Oswald's politics is that he picked up a leaflet in New York City about the coming execution of the Rosenbergs. And as he reads this, it begins to show him that there's a way of finding himself by opposing the established order.

Edward Jay Epstein

What made the Rosenberg pamphlet memorable to him, surely, was that he saw himself in the “innocent victim” of a New York court. He held in his hand a message that said to him: Here are allies you can identify with. Here are people who feel as you do about the legal system.

Jean Davison

The chain of events that ended in the murder of JFK began when a troubled, alienated teen-ager was ensnared by a fashionable conspiracy theory.

We usually don’t think of the JFK assassination in this way. Yet, it is undeniable that Oswald’s ideological awakening started with the Rosenberg pamphlet. He explicitly noted this event in explaining how he became a Marxist and defector to the Soviet Union.

It is also undeniable that to believe that the Rosenbergs were innocent one had to believe that high level government officials manufactured evidence, coerced perjury, and forged documents. In short, a massive conspiracy to frame two innocent people. Since we know they were far from innocent, what else should we call it but a “baseless conspiracy theory”?

It was fashionable, though, so it did not receive the disdainful debunking administered to theories accepted by less privileged people. Journalists, screenwriters, academics promoted it for decades. It took real bravery for Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton to debunk it in The Rosenberg File in 1983.

Even then the die-hard believers persisted. They never faced the vitriol and ridicule meted out to other conspiracy theorists. The SPLC did not label them dangerous, enablers of radicalization, or inciters of potential assassins.

For over half a century enormous efforts have been made to shift the blame from Oswald, the Castro-loving communist, to more politically expedient villains right-wing oil men, CIA, the military-industrial complex, the Mafia, right-wing hate vibes, etc., etc., etc..

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Saul Bellow

Another innocent victim of the 'Red Scare'

Cedric Belfrage: The WW2 spy Britain was embarrassed to pursue

Britain failed to prosecute a member of the intelligence services who passed secrets to Russia in World War Two out of fear of embarrassment, files in the National Archives have revealed.

MI5 also appeared to have failed to grasp the significance of former film critic Cedric Belfrage's activities.

The Briton worked for an arm of MI6 in New York after a career in Hollywood.

But his colleagues were unaware he had become increasingly left wing, probably after a trip to the Soviet Union.

Historians say his espionage could be ranked alongside that conducted by members of the Cambridge spy ring during the Cold War.

Hey, let's see what a respected journalist had to say in his book the American style of (right-wing) paranoia:

McCarthy ordered an immigration officer to be present when an alien of long standing took the Fifth Amendment. The alien was Cedric Belfrage, an author who wrote for Hollywood fan magazines, had been Sam Goldwyn's press agent, and who had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936. After taking the Fifth, Belfrage was arrested on a deportation warrant, held at Ellis Island, and then deported to Great Britain

Ooops. Warning to journalists. Archives and documents may be hazardous to your narrative.

Looking forward to reading this book

The company she keeps

Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal has been a conspiracy theorist for a long time.

“Grassy Knoll” Sid:
Hillary’s Personal Conspiracy Theorist

Four decades ago, Blumenthal was not only in league with JFK assassination buffs who claimed shots were fired from the proverbial grassy knoll--he also argued earnestly that “the reason the hopes of the ‘60s were not realized was because a group of people at the top made certain they were dashed.”

The previous sentence comes from Government By Gunplay, a 1976 paperback book edited by Blumenthal and Harvey Yazijian. Yazijian being one of the founding members of what was called the Assassination Investigation Bureau (AIB), then headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts....


Government by Gunplay would bear Blumenthal’s editorial imprint more than anyone’s. He wrote the foreword, the epilogue, and two chapters (one on the FBI’s COINTELPRO plan against the Black Panthers, and another on the Rockefeller Commission).

The misrepresentations, distortions, and falsehoods that Blumenthal either wrote or associated himself with are so numerous and stupendous they defy listing. ...


there is no indication that Blumenthal retracted or ever distanced himself from the rampant paranoia and crude, Soviet-style propaganda evident in Government By Gunplay. (Change the names of the editors, contributors, and publisher, and Government By Gunplay is almost indistinguishable from the slew of Soviet disinformation tracts about the assassination published from the 1960s to the 1980s, save that it is more thoughtful and informed, and much better written). Blumenthal’s penchant for spinning conspiracy theories has persisted, the only difference being they seem to have become more sophisticated.

RTWT

As HRC says, she has known Blumenthal for a long, long time. They became friends when Blumenthal's "vulgar Marxism" was still fresh and his penchant for conspiracies was on full display.

Worth noting:

Philip Agee, a disgraced former CIA officer who was effectively functioning as an agent of Cuban counterintelligence by 1976, wrote the introduction to Government By Gunplay.

Also worth noting: Blumenthal's far-Left views and "paranoid style" was no hindrance to his journalistic career. The Washington Post, New Republic, and The New Yorker were happy to give him a big megaphone and treat him like a star.

Breaking news without excuses

Our neutered press critics are fond of blaming bad reporting on the pressures created by technology and competition. Smaller newsrooms mean fewer reporters are available to cover important news. The internet and the 24-hour news cycle force the poor overworked darlings to tweet, update breaking stories, blog, make TV appearances, and monitor social media. It is just too much for even most noble of humans (i. e. journalists) so we should not be surprised when mistakes are made. Nor should we dwell too much on said mistakes.

As with most establishment press criticism, this argument is mostly special pleading to excuse bias and sloppy behavior.

I recently finished a book that puts the lie to these excuses and demonstrates how good reporters and editors handle tough challenges.

When the News Went Live is a first person account by four local reporters in Dallas who suddenly had to cover the biggest story in the world. These four men wanted to get the story right and they did so despite all the pressures and potential pitfalls.

It was not easy. Not only were they covering an earth-shattering event, they faced the same kind of demands that modern reporters whine about:

We wrote our own copy. There were no news readers among us. Eddie demanded versatility, and all of us were prepared to report and write as well as shoot film and operate audio equipment.

While most of the media handled the story with professionalism, some grievous mistakes were made. Perhaps the most notorious was Dan Rather’s report that schoolchildren cheered when they were told that Kennedy had been shot.

As Bob Huffaker recounts, Rather tried to get the story on the air at KRLD. Their news director smelled a rat, called the school and discovered that the cheering was by children who did not know the reason why the school was letting them out early.

Rather, never one to let the mundane truth stand in the way of a juicy narrative, managed to get the story on the CBS network broadcast.

Walter Cronkite and CBS News were more easily duped than the yokels at KRLD.

Reporter Eddie Barker describes the methods of the big city press that flooded Dallas to cover the assassination:

Most of them, unfortunately, had written their stories on the plane.

Other reporters followed Rather’s path.

I rolled the tape and gave him [Robert Pierpoint] the nod. 'They say that Dallas is not a city of hate,' he bagan. 'And yet, on the streets of Dallas, one gets the impression---' he continued. Then to my amazement, he characterized Dallas as a center of political extremism and distrust, then went on to imply that some vaguely defined sense of unease and hatred still lurked in the city where he'd landed not a half-hour earlier.

He ended his report, 'This is Robert Pierpoint, CBS News, in Dallas." To be sure, he had actually done the feed from Dalla. Its overriding impression was that he had taken time to gauge the mood of the city, but I marveled that he'd managed to accomplish his analysis in a ten-minute ride from the airport.

Pierpoint was parroting the media line-- Dallas was a city of hate after all-- and apparently one could draw that conclusion by landing at Love Field and riding to our newsroom.

Then, as now, the problem of bad reporting had little to do with technology or time pressure. It is a question of bias and the tyranny of the narrative.

Sure, competitive pressure and ambition played a role, but they were subservient to the narrative. As the Dan Rather example shows, a reporter who wanted to cut corners to report a “scoop” could only do it by playing to the biases of the deciders in New York and Washington. “Blame Dallas” stories received instant air play. “Blame the communists” stories were spiked. A reporter who wanted to advance the latter narrative faced push back and had to do much more work to get his story on the air or in the paper. Hence, that counter-narrative drew no support from the ambitious journalist on the make.

JFK: Beyond Camelot

These web casts from the New Criterion are outstanding:

The Kennedy Phenomenon: 50 Years after the Assassination

#JFK

JFK and the Kitty Genovese case

An interview with an iconoclastic scholar of the Kitty Genovese case and the media myths that surround it.

The Witnesses That Didn't (Transcript)

(HT: tl;dr)

The bottom line is that 38 New Yorkers did not watch the murder of a woman while doing nothing to help her.

Joseph De May has an interesting take on why the media was so quick to create and promote the bystander myth.

The Kitty Genovese murder happened four months after the assassination of President Kennedy. In the aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination, there was a school of thought that said we all killed President Kennedy. Now, four months later, Kitty Genovese is killed, not by a man whose psyche and life experience is not in any way reflective of ordinary Americans. These were 38 respectable law-abiding citizens. These – that was us. And I think it was a tremendous blow to the American psyche to think that such a thing could happen here, anywhere here. I think that that’s what gave this story legs.

The forgotten victim

The Murder of J.D. Tippit: Five Decades Later the Slain Cop Gets His Due

Few people today know who J.D. Tippit was and even fewer know that it was his murder that led to the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, the Texas School Book Depository employee who later would be accused of assassinating President Kennedy.

JFK:50

Bryan Preston has an intersting answers that will make Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw cry.

6 Reasons the Media/Left Refuse to Let the Kennedy Assassination Go

Speaking of Brokaw, i caught a snippet of "Morning Joe" today. Brokaw and Dan Rather rehashing memories of 11/22/63. It was kind of pathetic. A couple of old bulls, long ago put out to pasture, telling stories about their Glory Days.

Which suggests a seventh reason why television has gorged on this anniversary. The JFK assassination is commonly noted as the moment when television became the primary medium through which Americans received their news. Fifty years later and the media landscape is completely transformed. Broadcast news is a dinosaur hoping to survive.

It is not surprising that TV newsreaders and producers want to hearken back one more time to a glamorous, golden past.

(Just wait until next summer when the whole MSM does its 40th annual Nixon/Watergate victory dance.)

Mark Steyn on the forgotten assassination

The Ghosts of November

Two presidents died that November, but the mawkish parochialiasm of the Camelot cult has obliterated the fact that the second bore responsibility for the death of the first. No “eternal flame” for Diem, just an unmarked grave. He’s the Mary Jo Kopechne of the autumn of 1963, unhelpful to the myth: “What goes around comes around” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “one brief shining moment.”

JFK: Fifty Years Later

JFK Assassination Specials: A Guide to 50th Anniversary Television Programming

This could be an interesting read

Epstein is one of the smartest writers around so this is not going to be your usual true crime book.

Why some newspapers deserve to die

A troubled (redundant: is there any other kind? ed.) local paper decided to offer their paying customers a preview of tomorrow’s VP debate.

High drama: How Joe Biden can defeat Paul Ryan in VP debate

The deciders drew on their vast professional expertise and offered up a piece that was part meandering paean to gaffe-prone Joe and part slap-dash hit job on Paul Ryan.

The real WHAT WERE THEY THINKING moment comes at the end. Here we find the brief bio that tells the reader why they should pay attention to the astute analysis just presented.

Harry “H.C.” Nash is a writer and painter living in Williamsport. He is marketing a book titled “Patsy of the Ages: Lee Harvey Oswald and His Nation Half a Century Later.”

That’s right. The Harrisburg Patriot-News is offering political “analysis” by a loony* JFK conspiracy theorist who believes that “a deliberate fraud was perpetrated by officials of the U.S. government to conceal the conspiracy that assassinated the president.”

*Bryan Burroughs:

What Bugliosi has done is a public service; these people should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers; next time one of your co-workers starts in about Oswald and the C.I.A., make him stand in the rain with the other outcasts.

What did Fidel know and when did he know it?

The Kennedy assassination: Did Castro know in advance?

A new book by former CIA analyst Brian Latell details evidence that Cuban intelligence knew beforehand of JFK’s assassination.

Almost a half century ago

The Assassination of John F. Kennedy – 48 Years On

On the futility of arguing with conspiracy theorists

Neo-neocon wonders what motivates the promoters of JFK conspiracy theories:

The Kennedy conspiracists’ conspiracy

Bugliosi makes an especially interesting point in his introduction, one I hadn’t really thought of before, which is that although most of the people who believe in the various conspiracies are probably sincere in their beliefs, many of those who actually write the conspiracy books are not. They are lying and they know it, but they count on their readers not to realize this.*

It's a question that probably deserves book-length treatment.


One of the commenters pointed to this wonderful quote from Robert Heinlein:

I could go on endlessly--but there isn't time. This won't change the mind of your friend; when a man makes up his mind without evidence, no evidence disproving his opinion will change his mind.

One point Bugliosi emphasizes is that most of those who doubt the conclusions of the Warren Commission have never read the commission's Report or any serious work by a supporter of the commission. The skeptics rely on the material written by critics of the WC. Hence, arguing with them is frustrating because they reached their 'conclusions' without ever having an open mind in the first place.


Frequently, they dismiss books without reading them. They reject the arguments and research that contradict their pet theories with a smug knowingness and simply keep repeating their talking points.


(One of that ilk shows up in Neo-neocons comments)


Neo-neocon continues the discussion in a later post:

Kennedy assassination conspirators again: how they operate


There are two topics almost guaranteed to draw a lot of heated commentary and trolls.


No, I’m not speaking of tits and ass (hey, I just threw that in to see if some traffic would come). I’m speaking of (a) anything defending Israel; and (b) anything challenging the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.

*I'm not sure that i agree with Bugliosi on the honesty and honor of the average JFK Grassy Knoller. I incline toward Bill Whittle's view laid down here:

SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2

Related:

The Porn-Conspiracy connection

Debunking a rumor can make it seem more true?

Bill Whittle takes on conspiracy thinking

#ad

Oliver Stone: A Martyr in his own mind

Speaking of his 1991 film JFK, Stone said he thought it was “a good thing” to revisit the JFK assassination but was surprised when historians and film reviewers jumped on him for fudging facts, inventing characters and elevating speculation to truth in an effort to back up his own belief that Kennedy was killed by a CIA-led cabal masterminded by the “evil genius” Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman.

“It’s an amazing story and I did it,” Stone said. “I thought I would be respected for it, and I was lambasted in the establishment press. I was called a myth-maker, a propagandist. I didn’t see it coming. I thought the Kennedy murder was safe.”

Dale K. Myers provides the appropriate commentary:

Anyone with a half-nut knows that Stone’s JFK, while fabulous and provocative filmmaking, doesn’t have anything to do with reality when it comes to the JFK assassination. For Stone to pretend that it does shows just how bankrupt the conspiracy crowd is when it comes to dethroning the case against Lee Harvey Oswald. That doesn’t stop them from trying though, does it?

For forty-six years we’ve been hearing about the big conspiracy that killed Kennedy and still we’ve seen not one shred of believable evidence that anyone other than Oswald was behind the deed.

RTWT.

Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?

Edward Jay Epstein:

The Warren Commission concluded– rightly I now believe– that Oswald fired all the shots that killed the President. But conspiracies do not necessarily require multiple rifleman to accomplish their purpose. And what the Warren Commission could not absolutely rule out, as two of its members pointed out to me, was the possibility that Oswald had acted at the behest of others. After all, he had advertised his willingness to undertake a high-profile assassination by circulating photographs connecting himself to the shooting of General Walker. Any party who was monitoring his activities in Dallas, New Orleans or Mexico City could have discerned from them that he was a potential assassin awaiting a mission. With his mind set on such violent actions as hijacking a plane, blowing up the FBI office, or killing "any American," not much would be required to prod him to violence. He had sought liaisons in dangerous quarters and someone could have provided him with an inducement.

JFK: The Castro connection

Gus Russo updates his research:

The Dallas-Cuba Connection - 2009 Update

Documents released last week under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIPA) detail a secret CIA-National Archives (NARA)-State Department investigation of Cuban intelligence officer Fabian Escalante and reveal, among other things, that Escalante had an indirect connection to accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and that my revealing conversation with former Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB) Executive Director Jeremy Gunn about the Escalante files was accurately reported in my 2008 book, Brothers in Arms.

His book is well worth a look. It is solidly researched and not at all like the usual conspiracy-theorists fodder.

But remember, they know better in New York

In a rare moment of lucidity, Susan Sontag made a painful admission:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

We see the same elite ignorance with the JFK assassination. Those who relied on The New York Times, The Nation, or Partisan review were "knew" that Dallas and theradical right-wing were to blame. In contrast, the Tulsa Daily World ran this page one headline the day after the assassination:

PRO-RUSSIAN CASTROITE HELD
AS KENNEDY KILLING SUSPECT