A note to readers: Normally, I post my book reviews only on
another site of mine, Chuckman’s Miscellanea of Words, but because of
the nature of this book and its being the 48th anniversary of John
Kennedy’s assassination, I am also posting on this site.
The blurb inside this book tells us that Joan Mellen is a professor
of English and creative writing at Temple University, and sadly that
fact confirms my darkest fears about American education, because Ms.
Mellen, as amply demonstrated by significant portions of this book,
often cannot write a literate paragraph. It is appalling how many badly
written pages are in this volume.
Why did I continue to read it? I am a great admirer of the late Jim
Garrison, who incidentally was a pretty fine writer, and being aware of
the hatchet-job books done on his efforts in the Kennedy assassination, I
wanted to read something of a defense. Ms. Mellen’s book is one of the
few, so I persevered through her muddy paragraphs in hopes of reaching a
bit of clear water and learning something.
Well, it does get somewhat better through the middle of the book, and there are some interesting points and details raised here.
I very much believe that Jim Garrison stumbled upon something big in
New Orleans, something very big, part of the conspiracy to kill John
Kennedy, a conspiracy carefully ignored by the Warren Commission and
later by The House Select Committee.
Garrison was a very intelligent and able man, but no individual, no
matter how bright and brave and dedicated, could have completely
withstood the assaults of a Washington establishment determined to smear
and mislead and destroy him. The imbalance of forces was terrifying,
and the efforts likely shortened Garrison’s life. This book does
document some of that in its better-written portions.
I never shared Garrison’s belief that the CIA as an organization
killed Kennedy, although it just could not be clearer to people who’ve
read enough on the subject that the CIA always worked to manipulate and
distort evidence in this matter. Indeed, it continues to do so to this
day.
For Jim Garrison, fighting all the dirt and abuse, it would naturally
seem that they were covering their own responsibility. I believe rather
that they have been covering what would have been explosive information
in the 1960s: that their private army of Cuban terrorists killed the
President, aided more than likely by the direct or indirect help of the
CIA handlers responsible for arming, training, and paying that gang of
cutthroats in their long efforts at mayhem and murder in Cuba and in
Florida.
People today almost cannot imagine the fetid political atmosphere in
the United States of the 1950s and 1960s. It was poisonous, so much so
that in many other places people were deeply concerned that the United
States would do some terrible things. That view was part of what
informed spies the Britain’s Cambridge Circle. The United States in that
era seriously considered a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet
Union and later on China and it thought nothing of invading a country
like Cuba or of overthrowing even democratically-elected governments
like those in Guatemala and Iran.
Discrediting the CIA in any way at that time, much as it was
deserved, was regarded almost as treason, and that was why the CIA lied
and cheated its way through every effort at genuine investigation. The
CIA was up to its armpits in collusion with mobsters and thugs of every
description to achieve the overthrow of Castro, and when its secret army
of Cuban fanatics killed the President, with or without the assistance
of their professional CIA handlers, it simply could not be revealed.
Truth be known, I feel confident many of the CIA’s career men were glad
when he died, believing he did not possess the blind faith they
embraced.
The FBI too was glad. Hoover hated the Kennedys beyond describing.
And with CIA backing and other political backing, it felt safe to cover
and even destroy evidence in its almost laughable race to find poor
Oswald guilty, and it was very convenient to portray Oswald as a “Commie
nut” since the lifelong passion of Hoover was to lynch as many
Communists as he could, even while he was friends with American
gangsters.
For some while after the assassination, the CIA tried – through
articles and books by its assets in American publishing – to blame
Castro for the assassination, but that pathetic story pretty much
withered away, Castro being far too clever to have hired someone like
Oswald or to have given America’s establishment the excuse it wanted to
cover an invasion.
It is well known in intelligence operations that you not only prepare
a primary fall-back story – the Castro story – but a secondary one
should that fail to gain traction, and that second one is blaming the
mafia. The inept Robert Blakey, largely responsible for the feeble
efforts of the House Select Committee investigation, put that idea
forward. So too did others in a series of contrived books.
It is still around today, with new proponents surfacing periodically.
What the story ignores is the virtual impossibility of getting the
various mafia clans – the mafia not being a single organization but a
group of loosely cooperating families – to agree on so extreme an act,
putting all their billions in assets at risk and giving law enforcement
the perfect excuse to shut them down completely.
Again, in Bertrand Russell’s profound question, “If, as we are told,
Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?”
So we pretty much know ipso facto that Oswald cannot have been the lone
killer, and that’s apart from his lack of motive and talent and an
almost complete lack of sound evidence.
So what is the CIA hiding? Its own embarrassment and incompetence and
criminal behavior with terrorist groups like the Cuban refugees, as
well as the extreme danger to a free society of having such a
well-financed organization with almost no responsibility to anyone.
