On April 28, 1961—a decade after General Douglas MacArthur was fired for defying Harry Truman on Korea—the controversial commander hosted President John F. Kennedy at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where MacArthur and his wife lived in a suite on the 37th floor.
Given MacArthur’s reputation as a warmonger, what the general told the new president may surprise you.
In his era, Johnson was rightly vilified in his escalation of the Vietnam War, but in other areas of legislation (the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the anti-poverty Great Society) LBJ sought to uplift the underclass in this country, based on an empathy that is smartly expressed in the film. The assassination of JFK was a shocking act, and it was Johnson in the aftermath who had to reset the path of a nation.
Source: ‘LBJ’ is Important American History Brought to Light
Our sixth podcast. This week we discuss:
— Jim Lesar’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Morley v. CIA
— Jeff Morley responds to a question about the 2017 declassification and how that may impact CIA and JFK: The Secret Assassination Files
— Dr. John Newman’s planned update to 1992’s JFK and Vietnam
— Diplomatic historians and the evolving understanding of JFK’s attitudes about imperialism and anti-colonial calls for independence throughout the third world
— Richard D. Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa (1983) and The Kennedy Brothers (2011)
— Betting on the Africans, Phillip E. Muehlenbeck
— Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, Robert Rakove
— Jeff Morley’s upcoming book on James Angleton
To download the podcast as an MP3: Click HERE; Place cursor on file; RIGHT click and select “Save Audio As.”
Got a question or a comment? Contact us at editor@jfkfacts.org and we’ll talk about it on the show.
———
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.
“At the end, Ngu Dinh Diem was talking to nobody but his brother Nu. Read more
The single most popular story on JFK Facts for the week of April 10-17 recounted how Lee Oswald apparently fired a rifle shot at Gen. Edwin Walker, a right-wing firebrand and critic of JFK, in April 1963. The second most popular story linked United Methodist minister Lance Moore and theologian James Douglass as a unique type of JFK author:
The top five:
The question is still “hotly debated” says the JFK Library and Museum, not the least because the question has become part of the debate over the causes of JFK’s assassination.
What does the record show about Kennedy’s thinking and actions on Vietnam? Read more
During “Sunshine Week” please come to this screening in downtown Washington DC of the documentary “JFK: A President Betrayed,” (which the New York Times called “well-researched”).
There will also be a discussion of “Constitutional Activism” as a means of expediting release, during 2014, of all JFK assassination-related records still withheld from the public.
Regarding the post on the Pentagon burning the Osama bin Laden death photos, Andrew Everett writes:
Recently, I read a 1967 Washington Post column by Art Buchwald in which he estimated that it cost $323,000 to kill one enemy combatant in Vietnam. Mr. Buchwald then questioned whether the U.S. would be better off to offer Viet Cong defectors “a $25,000 house, a color TV, free education for their children and a paid-up country club membership.” Funny — haha. A $25,000 house!!!
Yes. He had a plan to do just that, as University of Texas professor Jamie Galbraith demonstrates in this recent piece for The Nation.
Narrated by Morgan Freeman, this new documentary by Cory Taylor goes where the recent mainstream news organization coverage did not dare: to the political context of JFK’s violent removal from power.
The New York Times called it “well-researched” and a “worthy entry” in the JFK documentary film catalog.
The JFK assassination story is bleeping complicated.
From Indy Week, the North Carolina alt-weekly, comes a useful guide for making sense of it all: 13 documents you should read about the JFK assassination. Read more
Jefferson's Morley compulsively readable, and deeply reported biography of CIA spymaster James Angleton is "the best book ever written about the strangest spy chief who ever lived," says Tim Weiner. From the OSS to the CIA to MKULTRA and JFK, Angleton was a ghost of American power. BUY THE GHOST NOW.
In Our Man in Mexico, investigative reporters tells the remarkable story of CIA station chief and what he really thought of JFK's assassination. Click on the cover image to buy it now.