Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

378 William Manchester's mysterious experts


Context:
480 William Manchester rough notes & tape recordings

        Has anyone seen this material? William Manchester, in an early draft of his book
            The Death of a President, implied that he had examined it.

The autopsy photos and X-Rays are critical. Their examination by qualified experts might throw great light on some of the questions that continue to puzzle us today. If a photograph of the President's back exists, it would definitely settle the controversy over the location of the back wound. Total body X-Rays might reveal the presence of other missiles still in the body. Head X-Rays might help us decide whether or not the President was struck more than once in the head.

The treatment of these photos and X-Rays by the government has been extremely irresponsible.

Although they constituted primary evidence of a critical sort, they were never viewed by any member of the Warren Commission or its staff —and this in spite of the fact that they remained in government custody until April 1965. At that time they were turned over to the Kennedy family. In November 1966 this material returned to government custody under an agreement with the family which prohibits non-governmental experts from viewing it until 1971.



Has anyone seen this material? William Manchester, in an early draft of his book The Death of a President, implied that he had examined it. When Richard Goodwin learned that this was false, that Manchester had actually been denied permission to see it, he pressured the author to remove the offending paragraph. The result was a mystifying footnote in the present edition in which Manchester admitted that he had not seen the X-Rays and photos, but had discussed them with three men, each a stranger to the others, who carried "special professional qualifications," and who had examined the material. It would be interesting to know just what "special professional qualifications" these shadowy experts hold. Not one of them is known to either Dr. Milton Helpern or myself, or for that matter (as far as I know) to any other member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

(Josiah Thompson, Six seconds in Dallas, p. 191)

380 The identity of a political Cuban at Parkland


More Wally Heitman:
59    Arnold Rowland's signed statements of November 26th , 29th , December 1st and 3rd or 4th
260  Pre-assassination reports and files of FBI agent Wally Heitman
375  One ten-page encoded teletype

Harold Weisberg, in his book Oswald in New Orleans,reveals that a Cuban refugee of "disruptive influence" was employed at Parkland at the time of the assassination. Pointing out that the Commission’s best evidence indicated that 399 was a "plant," Weisberg finds it extremely suspicious that no effort was made to identify this "political Cuban" when his existence was known to both the Secret Service and the Commission. Such a man would have had access to the stretcher on which 399 was found and would not have attracted the least suspicion, since he was an employee of the hospital.

(Howard Roffman, Presumed Guilty, p. 75, 1976)



Father McChann said that while he was interested in the Cuban groups in Dallas he was contacted about four or five times by Wallace Heitman of the Dallas Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He first made a contact with Heitman when it came to his attention that one of these Cuban refugees was extorting money from some other Cubans, was making false promises to the Cubans, was a disruptive influence in the Cuban community and was considered by Father McChann to be a “political Cuban” rather than a Cuban who was interested in receiving any assistance from the Committee. He could not recall the name of this Cuban but he believes the Cuban is still employed at Parkland Hospital.

(Letter from James Rowley to J. Lee Rankin, 4-5-1964)

382 The 1956 Bruce-Lovett Report



Compare:
114 RFK's Marcello-Halfen-Johnson file
125 The Congressional Bader Report

                "One of the few Iron Laws of History:
        the official who keeps the best records gets to tell the story"

Soon after President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Actitivites, that Board requested that Robert A. Lovett and David K.E. Bruce examine CIA's covert operations. This information comes from Arthur Schlesinger's book about Robert F. Kennedy.



"Bruce was very much disturbed," Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry in 1961. "He approached it from the standpoint of 'what right have we to go barging into other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?' He felt this was an outrageous interference with friendly countries ... He got me alarmed, so instead of completing the report in thirty days we took two months or more."

The 1956 report, written in Bruce's spirited style, condemned

the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being. ... Busy, moneyed, and privileged [the CIA] likes its "King Making" responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating – considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from "successes" – no charge is made for "failures" – and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!). Bruce and Lovett could discover no reliable system of control. "there are always, of course, on record the twin, well-born purpose of 'frustrating the Soviets' and keeping others 'pro-western' oriented. Under these almost any [covert] action can be and is being justified. ... Once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal lunch meetins of the OCB [Operations Coordinating Board] inner group) can, at best, be described as pro forma." One consequence was that "no one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on." With "a horde of CIA representatives" swarming around the planet, CIA covert action was exerting "significant, almost unilateral influences ... on the actual formulation of our foreign policies ... sometimes completely unknown" to the local American ambassador.

Bruce and Lovett concluded with a plea about taking control of covert operations and their consequences:

Should not someone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be ... calculating ... the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed a virtual abandonment of the international "golden rule," and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible in a great measure for stirring up the turmoitl and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? ... Where will we be tomorrow? "Bruce was very much disturbed," Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry in 1961. "He approached it from the standpoint of 'what right have we to go barging into other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?' He felt this was an outrageous interference with friendly countries. ...

The CIA itself would like more detail on this report, a copy of which could not be found, in 1995, by the Agency's History Staff. Referring to reports such as the Dulles-Jackson-Correa, Doolittle, Pike, Church, and Rockefeller reports, the Staff "recently ran across a reference to another item, the so-called "Bruce-Lovett" report, that it would very much like to read—if we could find it! The report is mentioned in Peter Grose's recent biography Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. According to Grose, [Bruce and Lovett] prepared a report for President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1956 that criticized CIA's alleged fascination with "kingmaking" in the Third World and complained that a "horde of CIA representatives" was mounting foreign political intrigues at the expense of gathering hard intelligence on the Soviet Union.



David Bruce (1898-1977)

The History Staff checked the CIA files on the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). They checked with the Eisenhower Library. They checked with the National Archives, which holds the PBCFIA records. They checked with the Virginia Historical Society, the custodian of David Bruce's papers. None had a copy.

"Having reached a dead end, we consulted the author of the Dulles biography, Peter Grose. Grose told us that he had not seen the report itself but had used notes made from it by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger for Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978). Professor Schlesinger informed us that he had seen the report in Robert Kennedy's papers before they were deposited at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. He had loaned Grose his notes and does not have a copy of these notes or of the report itself."


Robert Lovett (1895-1986)

"This raises an interesting question: how did a report on the CIA written for President Eisenhower in 1956 end up in the RFK papers? We think we have the answer. Robert Lovett was asked to testify before Gen. Maxwell Taylor's board of inquiry on the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation. Robert Kennedy was on that board and may have asked Lovett for a copy of the report. But we do not have the answer to another question: where is the "Bruce-Lovett" report? The JFK Presidential Library has searched the RFK papers without success. Surely the report will turn up some day, even if one government agency and four separate archives so far haven't been able to find it. But this episode helps to prove one of the few Iron Laws of History: the official who keeps the best records gets to tell the story."

(Wikipedia, retrieved 7-18-2020)

384 Nagell-Popkin tapes



Related:
210 Secret Service interview with Marina Oswald re-Richard Nagell


Dear Ms. Grenobla

This letter is in response to the distortions and outright falsities printed about me in the article written by William W. Turner, titled BANK ROBBER, MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE LINKED TO JFK ASSASSINATION PROBE, which appeared in the July 25-31 edition of the Los Angeles Free Press.

I request that the Free Press either print a retraction of such lies and distortions or publish this letter.

Mr. Turner, who spent ten years as a Special Agent of the FBI, is not unfamiliar to me. He has authored similar articles, both during my imprisonment in the United States and while I was detained in the German Democratic Republic, in which he knowingly and purposefully cited numerous lies about me. He has proved himself adept at putting words in my mouth and misquoting his sources of information to lend credence to his major untruths, a skill he probably developed while serving with the Bureau's intelligence-security division. His recent claims cause me to wonder whether or not he ever left the FBI.

Professor Richard H. Popkin, from whom Mr. Turner obviously collected much of his latest baloney, is a character that I feel should either purchase a hearing aid or consult a psychiatrist. Each of my so-called discussions with him (all but one occurred over the telephone) were duly tape-recorded by me, and if he did in fact assert what Mr. Turner has attributed to him about me, then he too is a liar. (...)

(Letter from Richard Case Nagell to the editor of the LA Free Press, August 12, 1975)


Richard Henry Popkin (December 27, 1923 – April 14, 2005)
was an academic philosopher who specialized in the history of
enlightenment philosophy and early modern anti-dogmatism.
(Wikipedia, retrieved 7-23-20)


Richard Case Nagell (August 5, 1930 – November 1, 1995) is a
former United States military officer who, according to Dick
Russell's biography of him, claimed to have had foreknowledge
of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
According to Russell, Nagell also claimed to have gotten himself
arrested in a bank shooting weeks before the assassination to
avoid becoming a patsy. (...)
Nagell died from heart disease on November 1, 1995 in Los Angeles,
California, one day after the Assassination Records Review Board
had sent him a letter for information. 
(Wikipedia, retrieved 7-23-20)