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.
