Category: Experts

JFK Facts podcast: The trouble with conspiracy theories and their critics

Jefferson Morley and Alan Dale discuss Cass Sunstein’s ideas concerning conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

JFK Facts podcast: More about how to think (and not think) about the JFK story

Jefferson Morley and Alan Dale continue their discussion about the challenge of acquiring reliable methods by which reason and objectivity may prevail over alleged facts and confirmation bias.

  • Making sense of the JFK assassination 53 years later
  • Thomas Jefferson’s secret and almost 200 years of faulty expertise
  • Applying Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” to our understanding and methods

JFK Facts podcast: How to think (and not think) about the JFK story

Jefferson Morley and Alan Dale discuss the unique challenge of sifting misinformation, disinformation, and government secrecy while trying to established a rational and factual foundation of thinking about the assassination of President Kennedy.

How JFK pursued the ‘sweet approach’ to Cuba

At a conference on the 50th anniversary of the Warren Commission report in Washington in September, Cuba scholar Peter Kornbluh gave a fascinating talk on how President Kennedy pursued the idea of normalizing relations with Cuba in the spring of 1963.

In the State Department this was known as “the sweet approach,” Kornbluh says. The idea was to lure Fidel Castro out of his alliance with the Soviet Union instead of overthrowing him. …

Speaking Bluntly

I said on the podcast I would repost Alan Dale’s conversation with one of the most knowledgteable JFK researchers in the world: Malcolm Blunt. So here he is.

In praise of Mark Lane 

From WhoWhatWhy

If we accept Orwell’s dictum that truth-telling during a time of universal deceit equals revolution, America lost a great dissident when Mark Lane succumbed to a heart attack recently. In his careful, tweedy way, Lane did as much during the 1960s as any band of New Left radicals to change the national consciousness from blind acceptance of whatever came out of the TV to the bracing distrust of government that has marked public attitudes since the 1970s.

Source: Exclusive, Previously Unpublished Interview With Mark Lane – WhoWhatWhy

 John le Carré on the CIA

At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It’s the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret. All the rest of it—intervention, destabilization, assassination, all that junk—is in my view not only anticonstitutional but unproductive and silly.

Source: Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 149, John le Carré

KGB man talks about his time with Oswald

As a historian of the Cold War, I found these comments by retired KGB officer  Nikolai Leonov, to be fascinating. Whatever you think of his ideological convictions,Leonov was an effective secret intelligence professional for decades, a foe that CIA men like James Angleton and Win Scott had to respect..

The incubus of intervention: JFK vs. Dulles

Poulgrain questions how history would have unfolded if the US had not trained the Indonesian military to be a pro-Western ‘state within a state’. This action paved the way for the brutal Suharto regime which unleashed the bloody anti-communist purges of 1965-66.  Moreover, he asks the intriguing question of what would have happened if Kennedy had dodged the assassin’s bullet and survived to implement his alternative strategy to use massive civic aid to bring the archipelago into the Western camp

Source: The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles – Australian Institute of International Affairs

Scroll to Top