Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Re: MY SISTER NAKED IN SHOWER

was going to stay
there and win (p.374). But on September 2, 1963, in his interview
with Walter Cronkite, Kennedy states that the war is the
responsibility of "the people of Vietnam, against the
Communists." In other words, they have to win the war, not
Americans. Davis makes no mention of this. Davis similarly
ignores NSAM 111 in which Kennedy refused to admit combat troops
into the war, integral to any escalation plan, and NSAM 263,
which ordered a withdrawal to be completed in 1965. This last was
published in the New York Times (11/16/63), so Davis could have
easily found it had he been looking.
In light of this selective presentation of the record on Vietnam,
plus the acrobatic contortions performed on the Church Committee
report, one has to wonder about Davis' intent in doing the book.
I question his assertion that when he began the book he "did not
have a clear idea where it would lead." (p. 694) So I was not
surprised that in addition to expanding Exner's story, he
uncritically accepted the allegations about Mary Meyer and
Marilyn Monroe (pp. 610-612). As the reader can see, in the three
areas outlined at the beginning of this essay, Davis hit a
triple. In all the threads, he has either held steady or advanced
the frontier. It is interesting in this regard to note that Davis
devotes many pages to JFK's assassination (pp. 436-498). He
writes that Kennedy died at the "hands of Lee Harvey Oswald and
possible co-conspirators" (p. 436). Later, he will write that
Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy (p. 552). Going even further, he can
state that:
  It would be a misstatement, then, to assert that Deputy
  Attorney General Ka

and the Church Committee. Throughout, she sprinkles in
little aphorisms to neutralize any attacks. She quotes Oscar
Wilde (not famous for his history books) when she says that
history is merely yesterday's gossip. Later on she notes that
"today's gossip is tomorrow's headline," a bit self-serving
considering her profession. Rising to an Exner-like crescendo
near the end, she quotes the ancient Greek historian Herodotus,
who felt that history "is what people have said to me and what
I've heard, that I must write down." She leaves out the fact that
Herodotus did not have access to the National Archives, 3.5
million pages of newly declassified documents, and the on the
record testimony of the principals involved via Sen. Frank
Church.
Like the Washington Post and New York Times, Smith has her
hatchet out for the Church Committee. About the most extensive
investigation of the CIA and FBI ever, she says that it was a
"little nothing of a half-assed investigation," that the report
was written by "aides and underlings" and that they asked Exner
"rather pointless questions." She finishes them off by
characterizing it as "the pathetic 1975 Church hearings," the
implication being that Smith - between interviews of Barbara
Streisand and Julia Roberts - has been digging through the newly
declassified record and will now set us straight.
But her only source is Exner. And, like Kelley, Smith seems to
avoid asking the tough questions, probably because these two have
been pals since 1977. At one point she c

still rages.
  Millions of words have been written-pro and con. Yet no one
  has produced a single piece of hard evidence that Lee Harvey
  Oswald was anything more than a psychopath acting entirely
  on his own. (p. 106)
I could continue in a similar vein with excerpts from this book
and I could also go on with more questionable aspects of Clay
Blair's background. And I could then use this information, and
the inferences, to dismiss The Search for JFK. I could even add
that Blair's agent on his Kennedy book was Scott Meredith, who
was representing Judith Exner at the time. But I won't go that
far. I may be wrong, but in my opinion I don't think the book can
be classified as a deliberate distortion or hatchet job. Although
the authors are in some respects seeking to surface unflattering
material, I didn't feel that they were continually relying on
questionable sources or witnesses, or consistently distorting or
fabricating the record. As I have mentioned, the book can be
criticized and questioned-and dismissed-on other grounds, but, as
far as I can see, not on those two.
Dubious Davis
Such is not the case with John Davis' foray into Kennedy
biography. The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster 1848-1983, was
published in 1984, before Davis became the chief spokesman for
the anti-Garrison/Mob-did-it wing of the ramified assassination
research community. In its very title, his book is deceptive in a
couple of interesting ways. First, from the dates included, it
implies that the book will be a multigenerational family saga
tracing the clan from Joe Kennedy's parents down to youngest
brot

- chemical, biological, and nuclear -
by the United States government under the justification of waging a
preventive or preemptive war. Of course this Nazi Doctrine of Preventive
Warfare is nothing more than a pretext for waging a war of aggression in
the first place. So the Bush Jr. administration officially signaled that
it is fully prepared to be the first to use weapons of mass
extermination against its chosen adversaries around the world as part of
an offensive military operation, or even to launch a fu1l-scale war
itself. Shades of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!39 North Korea took notice and
responded accordingly to defend itself.
The Judgment of Nuremberg Suffice it to say here that the Nazi Doctrine
of Preventive Warfare was rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal when the
Nazi defendants attempted to make this reprehensible argument in order
to justify their invasion of Norway.40 Instead, the Nuremberg Tribunal
explicitly endorsed the well-known Caroline Case (1837), thus enshrining
this test as a basic principle of the post-World War II international
legal order: "It must be remembered that preventive action in foreign
territory is justified only in case of 'an instant and over-whelming
necessity for self-defense, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of
deliberation' (The Caroline Case)." Moreover, in order to further
justify their preventive war against Norway, the Nazi defendants arg

on ABC that he
had been had, he did it on the same spot where Rivers, Summers,
and Sylvia Chase had played martyrs for the tabloid cause, namely
20/20. On September 25th, Peter Jennings narrated the opening
segment of that program. With what we know in November, Jennings
approach reveals much by what was left out. Hersh appeared only
briefly on the segment. He was on screen less than 10% of the
time. The main focus was on the forensic debunking of the
documents (which we now know was underplayed by ABC.) Jennings
cornered Lex Cusack, the man who "found" the papers in the files
of his late father who was an attorney. From published accounts,
the documents were supposedly signed by five people: JFK, RFK,
Monroe, Janet DesRosiers (Joe Kennedy's assistant) and Aaron
Frosch (Monroe's lawyer). They outline a settlement agreement
between JFK and Monroe signed at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on
March 3, 1960. The documents set up a $600,000 trust to be paid
by contributions from the individual Kennedy family members to
Monroe's mother, Gladys Baker

1949 to 1957. He then became an
editor for the Saturday Evening Post and worked his way up to the
corporate level of that magazine's parent company, Curtis
Publications. Almost all of his previous books dealt with some
kind of military figure or national security issue e.g. The
Atomic Submarine and Admiral Rickover, The Hydrogen Bomb,
Nautilus 90 North, Silent Victory: the U.S. Submarine War Against
Japan. In his book on Rickover, he got close cooperation from the
Atomic Energy Commission and the book was screened by the Navy
Department. In 1969 he wrote a book on the Martin Luther King
murder called The Strange Case of James Earl Ray. Above the
title, the book's cover asks the question "Conspiracy? Yes or
No!" Below this, this the book's subtitle gives the answer,
describing Ray as "The Man who Murdered Martin Luther King." To
be sure there is no ambiguity, on page 146 Blair has Ray shooting
King just as the FBI says he did, no surprise since Blair
acknowledges help from the Bureau and various other law
enforcement agencies in his acknowledgements.
The Ray book is basically an exercise in guilt through character
assassination. This practice has been perfected in the Kennedy
assassination field through Oswald biographers like Edward
Epstein and Priscilla Johnson McMillan. Consider some of Blair's
chapter headings: "A Heritage of Violence," "Too Many Strikes
Against Him," "The Status Seeker." In fact, Blair actually
compares Ray with Oswald (pp. 88-89). In this passage, the author
reveals that he also believes that Oswald is the lone assassin of
Kennedy. He then tries to imply that Ray had the same motive as
his predecessor: a perverse desire for status and recognition.
Later,

Warsaw Pact
and the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave the U.S. Power Elite the
opportunity to put their Machiavellian scheme for world economic
hegemony into operation.26 In other words, the Bush Jr. wars of
aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a longstanding
American plan to control and dominate the oil and natural gas supplies
for Europe, Japan, and Asia, and thus the future of the world's economy.
What my teacher, mentor, and later friend, the late and great Professor
Hans Morgenthau once denominated as "unlimited imperialism"27 in his
classic work Politics Among Nations. 
Of course, the Bush Sr. war against Iraq for oil in 1991 was the first
battle in this U.S. quest for world economic hegemony. To the same
effect were the Bush Sr. invasion of Somalia;28 the Clinton/Bush Jr.
military intervention into Colombia;29 Bush Jr.'s support for the
anti-Chavez coup in oil-rich Venezuela;30 the post-9/11 U.S. military
intervention into and occupation of Djibouti in order to control the
Suez Canal/Persian Gulf oil route to Europe, and also to obtain direct
military access to the oil and natural gas resources around the Horn of
Africa; the August 2003 U.S. military intervention into Liberia, once
again to grab direct military access to the oil and natural gas
resources located off and on the West Coast of Africa;31 etc. Whatever
the public rhetoric or justification might be, the fact of the matter is
that if the reader looks at a map of the world, the United States
government has its military, paramilitary, and covert forces converging
upon and/or threatening 

liberal for Bush
Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and
spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie
himself. The Neo-Cons and the Fundies contracted an "unholy alliance" in
support of Bush Jr. For their own different reasons, both gangs also
worked hand-in-hand to support Israel's genocidal Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal.9 According to his
own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute,
President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in
his administration, intentionally taking offices where they could push
American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen
enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians.10 Most of the
Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere are
Israel-firsters: What is "good" for Israel is by definition "good" for
the United States. Dual loyalties indeed.11
In addition, it was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-Cons
who set up a special "intelligence" unit within the Pentagon that was
responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions,
half-truths, and sheer propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then
disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media12 in order to generate
public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of
Israel and in order to steal Iraq's oil.13 To paraphrase advice
Machiavelli once rendered to his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book:
Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be
deceived.14 As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of
the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of
Chicago's Neo-Con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli's The Prince. We

was well
known to the long-suffering Iraqi People.53 Tearing-up the
Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact Functionally today the United Nations
Organization has become about as ineffectual at stopping naked
aggression by the United States and its hench-state the United Kingdom
as the League of Nations had become in stopping Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, Imperial Japan, and Stalinst Russia during the 1930s. Indeed,
from a comparative historical perspective, under U.S. hegemonial
imperialism the legal, institutional and political situation is far
worse. For Security Council Resolution 1472 (2003) on Iraq constituted
the outright repudiation of 75 years of formal international legal
condemnation of wars of aggression by the world community of states. 
Between World War I and World War II, at the initiative of France and
the United States, the then world community of states concluded the
Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928.54 Article 1 thereof repudiated war as
an instrument of national policy: "The High Contracting Parties solemnly
declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn
recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and
renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with
one another." This prohibition countermanded the so-called Von
Clausewit

's War, New Statesman -
London, April 7, 2003; Julian Borger, The Spies Who Pushed for War, The
Guardian, July 17, 2003.
14. Machiavelli, The Prince 147 (M. Musa trans. & ed. 1964): ". . . and
men are so simple-minded and so dominated by their present needs that
one who deceives will always find one who will allow himself to be
deceived." This Bilingual Edition of The Prince by Mark Musa was the one
preferred by Joseph Cropsey to teach us students.
15. But see Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (1996).
16. Between the Lines, University of Chicago Magazine, June 2003, at 54.
17. Vincent Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America (2001); Greg Palast, The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy 11-81 (2003).
18. Gerhard Sporl, The Leo-Conservatives, Der Spiegel, Aug. 4, 2003.
19. McNamara Receives Pick Award Amid Protests, University of Chicago
Magazine, Summer 1979, at 4.
20. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (1993); Robert S. McNamara, In
Retrospect (1995).
21. See, e.g., Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance 118-40 (2003).
22. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956).
23. See, e.g., Jean-Charles Brisard & Guillaume Dasqué, Forbidden Truth
(2002).
24. Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit (2000).
25. Robert Dreyfuss, The Thirty-Year Itch, MotherJones.com, March 1,
2003.
26. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (1997).
27. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations 52-53 (4th ed. 1967).
This fourth edition of the book is the one I studied personally with
Morgenthau.
28. William Blum, Rogue State 158 (2000); John Pilger, The New Rulers of
the World 127-29 (2003).
29. Noam Chomsky, Rogue States 62-81 (2000).
30. Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Mone

to Davis, Kennedy
was thinking of the Senate when he was first elected to the
House. Then, from his first day in the Senate, he was thinking of
the Vice-Presidency (p. 147). Epitomizing this idea, Davis
relates a personal vignette about the Kennedy family wake after
JFK's funeral. Davis, a cousin of Jackie Kennedy, was leaving the
hall and paused to shake hands with Rose Kennedy to offer his
condolences (p. 450). Mother Kennedy surprised him by saying in a
cool, controlled manner: "Oh, thank you Mr. Davis, but don't
worry. Everything will be all right. You'll see. Now it's Bobby's
turn." Such coolness differs greatly from what is revealed in the
recently declassified LBJ tapes in which, after the
assassination, Rose could not even speak two sentences to the
Johnsons without dissolving into tears. But the portrait is in
keeping with the ruthless monarchy that Davis takes great pains
to portray.
As I said above, the main focus is Kennedy's short-lived
"dynastic" presidency. And this is where some real questions
about Davis' methodology and intent arise. As he does in his
assassination book Mafia Kingfish, Davis proffers a long
bibliography to create the impression of immense scholarship and
many hours quarrying the truth out of books, files, and
libraries. But, like the later