The writings of Vincent J Salandria on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are historic, foundational, and essential to any serious scholar interested in understanding the real dynamics of the Kennedy murder and its place as a terrible and pivotal moment of the American Century. In his 1967 book Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson notes that what he terms the “second generation” of assassination researchers—including Mark Lane, Edward J. Epstein, Harold Weisberg, Raymond Marcus, Léo Sauvage, Richard Popkin—owe “a deep debt to Salandria’s pioneering and largely unsung research.” Thompson is accurate, since Salandria is in the front rank of Warren Commission critics, and the prescience of his analysis is an instruction to all interested people.
Our second program featuring analysis and discussion of topics relevant to the study of President Kennedy’s assassination.
This week we discuss:
Nikolai Leonov’s Mexico City encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s birthday, an update on Stephen Roy’s work regarding David Ferrie, the challenge of attracting new students to JFK studies, recently published works by Carmine Savastano,Jacob Carter, and Jeremy Bojczuk, and our recommended books that focus on President Kennedy’s life rather than the circumstances of his murder.
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Jefferson Morley’s new ebook, CIA and JFK: The Secret Assassination Files, available on Amazon, provides the fullest account yet of the JFK records that the CIA is still concealing in 2016 and why they should be made public in October 2017.
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.
Its called JFK Facts Online. Each week Alan Dale and I will talk about the latest JFK news and developments. This week we talked about Mark Lane’s death, Dan Hardway’s deposition in Morley v. CIA and my upcoming book,
Listen to the first show here:
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Got a question or a comment? Drop us a line here and we’ll talk about it on the show.
“Rush to Judgment, the book, bravely informed Americans about the many questions surrounding the president’s murder and the subsequent “investigation.”
Mark Lane, famed Civil Rights attorney and author of the best-selling book, “Rush to Judgment,” which detailed the facts of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died late last night at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the age of 89.
In an exclusive interview with JFK Facts, Willens talks about his naivete about the CIA, what he thinks of Mark Lane, and how history will view the Warren Commission.
Howard Willens, a former Warren Commission staffer, acknowledged in a an email interview with JFK Facts that deputy CIA director Richard Helms was “not truthful” with the Commission and there is “no doubt” that counterintelligence chief James Angleton did not cooperate with the inquiry into JFK’s assassination.
While vigorously defending the Commission’s conclusions, Willens admitted he was naive about the CIA. Asked about a passage in his journal from March 1964 in which he wrote that senior CIA officials “did not have an axe to grind” in the commission’s investigation, Willens acknowledged “my comments about the CIA were naive to say the least.”
On December 17, 1963, a lawyer from New York named Mark Lane wrote to Chief Justice Warren to “respectfully request that your Commission give consideration to the appointment of defense counsel” for the accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He enclosed an article he had written.
The article was published two days later in the National Guardian, a weekly publication of leftist politics.
Anthony Summers, biographer and former BBC correspondent, has been writing about JFK’s assassination for three decades for publications ranging from The Times of London to Vanity Fair. In my possibly biased opinion, I think his book, “Not In Your Lifetime,” is the best single volume on the JFK assassination and its confusing investigatory aftermath.
I sent him some questions by email and he responded as follows:
JFKFacts: You started reporting on the JFK story in the late 1970s. You were one of the first professional journalists to look deeply into the JFK assassination story. What did you discover?
Anthony Summers: At the time of the assassination occurred, I’d been a student at Oxford. I had reporting ambitions, and Dallas was almost the first real story I covered. I’d been working for a TV program during the vacations, and the program’s editor phoned within an hour of the assassination – it was early evening in the UK – to say he was gathering a team and chartering a plane to Texas. Could I drop everything and come?
It was the Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, notes Mark Lane, author of “Rush to Judgment,” one of the first books criticizing the Warren Commission report. In a speech today at the Duquesne Univerisity JFK conference, Lane recounted that on the day JFK was killed, RFK asked CIA director John McCone if agency personnel were involved. McCone said no.