JFK Conspiracy for Younger Generations
By Cliff Varnell
February 24, 2019 in JFK Assassination Debate
Robert Harper
Location:Rotterdam, Netherlands
Interests:JFK, the arts, Bach
On 2/24/2019 at 3:25 PM, Cliff Varnell said:
2:06 to 14:40 Mr. Salandria discusses his greatest achievement.
I read his book and other articles but never saw this. It's as if a quarter of a century in time only intensified his observations and insights rather than blur any impact through time past. His candor and flow of thought is impressive and his confidence, his feeling of authority based on this confidence, is enabling . Like Bollyn and Griffen and Marshall and others on the 9/11 rigmarole, he "got it" early and got it clearly. Makes one imagine what if there had been an inquiry lead by Salandria? Imagine..
Footfalls echo in the memory towards the path we didn't take into the rose garden.
TS Eliot
(next day) I should have written "suggested by TS Eliot" instead of leaving the impression he wrote what I "quoted" from memory. The actual lines occur in the opening segment of his haunting Four Quartets:
Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose garden
Edited May 30, 2019 by Robert Harper
Paul Brancato 14 posts
Sandy Larsen 10 posts
James DiEugenio 6 posts
On 5/27/2019 at 1:28 PM, Paul Brancato said:
Yes - I was sure of that. Who are the T 3 deniers and what is their objection?
I encourage you to give the entire history as you see it, maybe starting a thread. Maybe this is old territory. Still .....
Paul, I'll save the T3 Shaming for another day.
What I've posted so far in this thread is JFKA 101 in the School of the Obvious; this is the foundational document of the SotO:
The Warren Commission, TheTruth, and Arlen Specter by Gaeton Fonzi -- Greater Philadelphia Magazine 1 August 1966
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GaetonFonzi/WCTandAS.html
Inspired by Vincent Salandria, Gaeton Fonzi confronted Arlen Specter with the clothing evidence and Specter had a nervous breakdown as the Single Bullet Theory was debunked right in his face. Everything Specter said in the June 28, 1966 interview was pure gibberish from the 15:30 mark to 19:40.
https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Featured_Fonzi-Specter_Interviews.html
"I''d have to take look at that shirt," moaned Specter at 18:45.
Transcript of Specter melting into a babbling fool found from the bottom of page 7 to the top of page 10:
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=146569#relPageId=8&tab=page
The high watermark of the JFKA Criticism -- speaking truth to power.
Reflections on Gaeton Fonzi's "The Warren Commission, The Truth, and Arlen Specter", by Vincent Salandria:
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/OnGaetonFonziWCT+AS.html
This is JFKA 102:
The Tale Told by Two Tapes by Vincent Salandria
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/TaleToldByTwoTapes.html
<quote on>
McGeorge Bundy was in charge of the Situation Room and was spending that fateful afternoon receiving phone calls from President Johnson, who was calling from Air Force One when the lone-assassin myth was prematurely given birth. (Bishop, Jim, The Day Kennedy Was Shot, New York & Funk Wagnalls, 1968, p. 154) McGeorge Bundy as the quintessential WASP establishmentarian did not take his orders from the Mafia and/or renegade elements.
<quote off>
Salandria's analysis is corroborated by a Newsweek reporter, Charles Roberts.
The President Has Been Shot. Charles Roberts (p. 141) Roberts was on AFI and met McGeorge Bundy at Andrews.
I remember looking at (McGeorge) Bundy because I was wondering if he had any word of what had happened in the world while we were in transit, whether this assassination was part of a plot. And he told me later that what he reported to the president during that flight back was that the whole world was stunned, but there was no evidence of a conspiracy at all.
Who would have given orders to McGeorge Bundy to repeat the lie that there was no evidence of conspiracy found in Dallas?
Bundy couldn't have made that determination sitting in the Situation Room.
Turns out there was another "quintessential WASP establishmentarian" who turned up telling a great big lie...
The Assassination Tapes, Max Holland, pg 57:
At 6:55 p.m. Johnson has a ten minute meeting with Senator J. William Fulbright and diplomat W. Averell Harriman to discuss possible foreign involvement in the assassination, especially in light of the two-and-a-half-year sojourn of Lee Harvey [in Russia]...Harriman, a U.S. ambassador to Moscow during WWII, is an experienced interpreter of Soviet machinations and offers the president the unanimous view of the U.S. government's top Kremlinologists. None of them believe the Soviets have a hand in the assassination, despite the Oswald association.
Jack Valenti – in "A Very Human President" (1973, p3)
Shortly before 7:00 P.M., I escorted Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Ambassador Averell Harriman into the office. I fidgeted outside, in the middle of what would have appeared to be an objective onlooker to be a mélange of confusion. No one of the Johnson aides, Marie Fehmer, his secretary; the late Cliff Carter, his chief political agent; Bill Moyers, nor any of the rest, was quite certain of what lay ahead. We were all busy on the phone and trying to assemble what measure of office discipline we could construct.
Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, by Rudy Abramson, pg 625:
He spent the afternoon helping [George] Ball, who was, if anyone truly was, running the United States government, since Rusk and several other Cabinet members were airborne, coming home after turning back from a flight to the Far East. As darkness fell, Averell drove out to Andrews Air Force Base with Ball and Alexis Johnson, joining the official mourning party standing silently on the floodlit ramp as the President's casket was lowered from the rear door of Air Force One.
The Wise Men, Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas, pg. 640:
[The Diem] coup was messy. Diem's body was found riddled with bullets and stab wounds.
John Kennedy himself was shot to death three weeks later. Bill Sullivan [Harriman's chief of staff] found Averell Harriman that afternoon sitting on the edge of his chair, in front of a television set, holding his head in his hands.
That Lee Harvey Oswald had been in the Soviet Union was announced on the news at 4:25pm EST. Sundown in Washington DC occurred at 4:50pm EST.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/washington-dc?month=11&year=1963
How could Harriman gather "the US government's top Kremlinologists" in such a short period of time? And all of them reached the same snap decision on the basis of next to no information?
In 1963 the top three Kremlinologists were George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Harriman himself .According to his biography Charles Bohlen was traveling in Europe that day; according to his biography, George Kennan spent the day quietly in Princeton with Robert Oppenheimer.
Harriman went out to Andrews around sundown with George Ball and Alexis Johnson -- neither of whom were Kremlinologists.
The idea anyone could draw the snap conclusion of Soviet innocence is absurd -- unless that person knew who pulled off the plot.
Edited June 1, 2019 by Cliff Varnell
On 5/29/2019 at 12:01 PM, Robert Harper said:
My favorite conspiracy theory...Vincent Salandria: "Notes on Lunch with Arlen Specter on January 4, 2012"
http://archive.politicalassassinations.net/2012/11/1560/
I explained [to Specter] that the day after the Kennedy assassination I met with my then brother-in-law, Harold Feldman. We decided that if Oswald was the killer, and if the U.S. government were innocent of any complicity in the assassination, Oswald would live through the weekend. But if he was killed, then we would know that the assassination was a consequence of a high level U.S. government plot.
Harold Feldman and I also concluded that if Oswald was killed by a Jew, it would indicate a high level WASP plot. We further decided that the killing of Oswald would signal that no government investigation could upturn the truth. In that event we as private citizens would have to investigate the assassination to arrive at the historical truth.
<quote off> 
Yes theory. Why else are we here? I knew there was a conspiracy on Nov 24, 1963. I'll bet you did too. You quote Salandria on your Forum page. What more can I say? I want to hear your theory. After all, you conclusively proved conspiracy beyond a doubt, and strong evidence that some of the shots came from rarified high technology, probably military. Good start.
As you may remember I suspect the military. I've laid out my theory many times. It always lands with a dud. Well, whatever. I'm just sick of parsing the proofs of conspiracy. I only care about who and why.
Paul, I re-named my JFKA 102 section --"Whodunnit -- maybe..." and added it to the master copy over at Deep Politics. They let me swear over there, so that's the official version.
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?12892-The-Origin-History-of-the-term-quot-Hardcore-Punk-Rock-quot&p=125636#post125636
Paul Brancato
Interests:Classical musician and author of several sets of trading cards including Iran-Contra Scandal, Bush League, and Coup D'etat JFK assassination.
Cliff - it's good work. Next step is a theoretical examination of who ran the operation on the ground.
i don't think that the actions of Bundy or Harriman after the assassination prove their foreknowledge. I'm not defending them, just saying. Everyone in power rallied around containing the event by claiming no conspiracy.
2 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:
I gotta go with Larry Hancock on this one -- Carl Jenkins and Henry Hecksher.
And I'd add Charles Siragusa as shooter recruiter.
Eventually. But a lot of people were initially claiming it was a Commie plot. Hoover tried to sell that angle to Bobby Kennedy.
And recall the state of LBJ's staff...
Confusion reigned -- until Johnson got his marching orders from Harriman. LBJ had Cliff Carter call Dallas Assistant DA Bill Alexander to order the communist conspiracy angle taken off the Oswald murder charges.
Imagine an American President in the 21st century gunned down in a major American city.
A former Marine is arrested. An hour and a half later it's reported that the Marine lived in Iran for two years.
Only two things are known: the President is dead, and the police arrested a former Marine who spent 2 years in Iran.
Now, can you imagine the US government's top Iran specialists unanimously concluding Iran had nothing to do with it right off the bat?
Iran is not a nuclear power.
Imtersting that you say Hoover tried to convince RFK of a Communist plot. Never heard that. If true RFK was a bizarre choice for Hoover.
Did Siragusa have access to high tech US military weaponry?
Sandy Larsen
Averell Harriman's apparent foreknowledge that Russia wasn't involved in the assassination leads Cliff to believe that he was in on the plot. It leads me to believe the opposite.
Why? Because Oswald's phony trip to Mexico City was designed to make the assassination look like a Russian/Cuban conspiracy, one meant to provide a pretext for an invasion of Cuba and wars with Russia-backed Communist countries in general. If Harriman were in on the plot, why would he he intentionally spoil that goal? Makes no sense.
On the other hand....
Some researchers believe that the purpose of the Russian/Cuban conspiracy angle wasn't to create a pretext for war, but rather to scare the Johnson Administration into halting the investigation, cover up the (fake) conspiracy, and blame the shooting on Oswald, for fear of a third world war. If that was the purpose of the Mexico City story, then it would make sense for one of the plotters to plant the seed for the coverup. Maybe that is what Harriman was doing.
5 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:
Why? Because Oswald's phony trip to Mexico City was designed to make the assassination look like a Russian/Cuban conspiracy, one meant to provide a pretext for an invasion of Cuba and wars with Russia-backed Communist countries in general. If Harriman were in on the plot, why would he he intentionally spoil that goal?
Because the capture of Oswald destroyed the possibility of blaming the Commies. For that plot to work Oswald had to be killed soon after Kennedy.
On 6/3/2019 at 7:02 AM, Cliff Varnell said:
On 6/3/2019 at 1:12 AM, Sandy Larsen said:
Good point. I agree that the plotters would have had to put the kibosh on their false flag operation.
So it sure does look like Harriman knew about the plot.
Or could it be that Harriman was simply wiser than the others, and realized that Russia wouldn't kill an American president and risk WW3? Or perhaps, as a former ambassador to Russia, Harriman had high-level contacts there who were anxious to let him know that Russia was not involved?
BTW, what would Harriman's motive be for killing JFK?
Edited June 19, 2019 by Sandy Larsen
could it be that Harriman was simply wiser than the others, and realized that Russia wouldn't kill an American president and risk WW3? Or perhaps, as a former ambassador to Russia, Harriman had high-level contacts there who were anxious to let him know that Russia was not involved?
Right on the button. I find it extremely difficult to include Harriman among the plotters. He offered his Georgetown home to Jackie and his wife objected to some aspect of that stay - too long, not invited etc. - and Harriman wasn't the Iago type. I'm still agnostic about certain individuals - Acheson, Bundy, McCloy, Rockefeller. I'm less agnostic and more persuaded that Angleton, Dulles, and Lemnitzer were.
Paul, Sandy, Robert
Let's game this out.
The news that Oswald had lived in Russia broke at 4:25 pm EST. Harriman was glued to the TV. He was going to leave for Andrews AFB within a half an hour. At that point all that was known was that Kennedy and a police officer were murdered, and an ex-Marine who'd lived in Russia was in custody.
How many "top Kremlinologists" or "other sources" could Harriman contact in less than half an hour?
We're supposed to believe that there was a consensus on Soviet innocence formed without any meaningful deliberation or investigation?
Do you guys actually buy that scenario?
17 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:
So Harriman is in on a plot that points to Russia-connected Oswald, but publicly declares that Russia had nothing to do with it. Then why bother to plant the evidence pointing at the USSR at all? If Harriman was aware of a plan, or part of one, it didn't include a Russia connected assassin.
1 minute ago, Paul Brancato said:
So Harriman is in on a plot that points to Russia-connected Oswald, but publicly declares that Russia had nothing to do with it.
Not publicly. To LBJ ten minutes after the new POTUS arrived at the White House.
Then why bother to plant the evidence pointing at the USSR at all?
To put the Soviets back on their heels while the US justified to the world the invasion of Cuba.
But that plot required Oswald to turn up dead soon after JFK.
Looks to me like the Skull & Bones boys called an audible after Oswald was arrested -- pin it on a lone nut instead of a Red agent.