Newsgroup: italia.bologna.barzellette
Titolo: Re: MY SISTER NAKED IN SHOWER

through, give the impression of mug
shots.
The accompanying text is suitable to the photo layout. There
seems to me to be both a macro and micro plan to the book. The
overall plan is to make Joe Kennedy a sort of manipulating
overseer to his sons and, at the same time, make him into a
status-seeking iconoclast whose beliefs and sympathies are contra
to those of America. The problem with this is dual. First, it is
the typical "like father, like son" blanket which reeks of guilt,
not just by association, but by birth. Second, the blatant ploy
does not stand scrutiny because what makes John and Robert
Kennedy so fascinating is how different their politics and
economics were from Joe Kennedy's and how fast the difference was
exhibited. To use just two examples from JFK's first term in the
House, Kennedy rejected his father's isolationist Republican type
of foreign policy and opted for a more internationalist approach
when he voted for the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan. Second,
Kennedy voted to sustain Truman's veto of Taft-Hartley which
would weaken unions and strengthen American big
businessmen-people like his father. From there on in, the splits
got wider and wider. It is this father-son 

war was a continuation of
diplomacy by other means. At the time it was generally believed that the
Von Clausewitz Doctrine had been responsible for the precipitation of
the First World War by Imperial Germany and its imperialist allies.
Today the Von Clausewitz Doctrine is now the operational rationale
behind the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policy. Can World War III
be far behind? Article II of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact mandated the
exclusively peaceful resolution of all international disputes: "The High
Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all
disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may
be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific
means." Iraq, the United States, and the United Kingdom are all
contracting parties to the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. Not that it
mattered to the Bush Jr. administration, which now openly preaches and
promotes the Violent Resolution of International Disputes Just like Nazi
Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan had done during the 1930s.
The Von Clausewitz Doctrine. Nevertheless, these two fundamental
requirements of the inter-war international legal order set forth in the
Kellogg-Bria

and Israel that had illegally attacked and invaded Egypt in their joint
and severable Nuremberg Crime against Peace for the purpose of
inflicting "regime change" against Egyptian President Nasser.62
The Bush Jr. pro-consul in Iraq Paul Bremer and his Iraqi puppet council
under the pro-Israeli Chicago Straussian Neo-Con CIA asset Chalabi
should be replaced by a U.N. Transitional Authority reporting directly
to the U.N. Trusteeship Council (not the U.S. co-opted U.N. Security
Council) in accordance with Chapter XIII of the U.N. Charter. The Iraqi
People can then proceed to exercise their international legal right to
self-determination for themselves in order to decide their own
political, economic, constitutional and legal future as they see fit -
not one pre-selected for them by the pro-Israeli Straussian Neo-Cons and
the Big-Oil operatives of the Bush Jr. administration who were
responsible for fomenting this criminal war of aggression against Iraq
in the first place. America for the Americans Otherwise, U.S., U.K. and
foreign military occupation forces will be facing another type of
Vietnam War situation. Iraq could readily become a combination of Tonkin
Gulf, L.B.J., Vietnam, Nixon, Cambodia, Watergate, and Impeachment63 all
over again, rolled into one, and accelerated. History repeating itself
as both a tragedy and a farce.64 Only this time the American Peace
Movement is ready. We have seen this elitist "game" of Machiavellian
Power Politics before. Once again, it is up to the common sense and
decency of the American People to stop it. Our alternative is an
American Empire in Eurasia and an American Police State at home. The
Thousand Year Nazi Reich was purportedly defending its "homeland" too.65
	Notes
1. See, e.g., Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance 108 (2003). 
2. Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo
Strauss and the American Right (1999). See also Alain Frachon & Daniel
Vernet, T

This erasure is so clear it even shows up in photos in
the Samuels article. Hersh has been a reporter since the early
sixties. For at least two decades (before computers came in), he
made his living with a typewriter. Yet, in all the hours he spent
looking at these papers, this anachronism never jumped out at
him?
That Hersh could be such an easy mark, that he was so eager to
buy into the Summers-Haspiel-Slatzer concoction tells us a lot
about what to expect from his book. As Anson notes, Hersh has
been talking not only to CIA officials, but also to Secret
Service people and, especially to Judith Exner. The reasons for
the CIA to lie about the Castro plots have already been
explained. At the beginning of part one of this piece, I
mentioned that many in the Secret Service hated Kennedy, realized
they were culpable in a security breakdown, and, like Elmer
Moore, worked hard to cover up the true circumstances of
Kennedy's murder. About Exner's motives, I can only speculate.
Will Hersh have her now say that she saw Marilyn with Kennedy and
Giancana in Hyannis Port on a sail boat eating pizza? From
Anson's description of panting-dog Hersh, delivering Exner to him
was a little like giving Geraldo copy of Goddess.
Mega-Trasher, or Just Mega-Trash?
Hersh's book promises to be the mega "trash Kennedy" book. And,
like any hatchet man, Hersh tries to disguise his mission. In the
Vanity Fair article, his fellow workers on the ABC documentary
say, "there have been moments when, while recounting private acts
of kindness by JFK, Hersh has broken down and wept." (Anson p.
122) This from a man who intimidated witnesses with his phony
papers and waved them aloft while damning the Kennedys with them.
I believe his tears as much as I do the seance that Ben Bradlee
and Jim Angleton attended to speak with the spirit of Mary Meyer
(see Part One). At the end, Hersh joins

the illness about as serious as that of a
diabetic on insulin. I exaggerate only slightly when I write that
the Blairs treat this episode as if Kennedy was the first
discovered victim of AIDS. They attempt to excuse the melodrama
by saying that Kennedy and his circle disguised the condition by
passing it off as an "adrenal insufficiency." Clearly, Kennedy
played word games in his wish to hide a rare and misunderstood
disease that he knew his political opponents would distort and
exaggerate in order to destroy him, which is just what LBJ and
John Connally attempted to do in 1960. The myopic authors save
their ire for Kennedy and vent none on Johnson or a potentially
rabid political culture on this issue.
The second major area of focus is Kennedy's sex life. The authors
excuse this preoccupation with seventies revelations, an apparent
reference to Exner, Meyer, and perhaps Monroe (p. 667). Kennedy
seems to have been attractive to females. He was appreciative of
their overtures. There seems to me to be nothing extraordinary
about this. Here we have the handsome, tall, witty, charming son
of a millionaire who is eligib

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
brother Teddy. But of the book's 648 pages of text, about 400
deal with the life and death of John F. Kennedy. And more than
half of those deal with his presidency. In no way is the book an
in-depth family profile. Secondly, as any school boy knows, the
word dynasty denotes a series or succession of at least three or
more rulers. So Jack Kennedy's two years and ten months as
president constitute the shortest "dynasty" in recorded history.
In reality, of course, it was not a dynasty at all and the
inclusion of the word is a total misnomer.
But there is a method to the misnoming. For Davis, it is
necessary to suggest a kind of "royal family" ambience to the
Kennedys and, with it, the accompanying aura of familial and
assumed "divine right." One of the author's aims is to establish
the clan as part of America's ruling class, with more power and
influence than any other. He is clear about this early on, when
he writes that Joe Kennedy Sr. was richer than either David or
Nelson Rockefeller (p. 133). As any student of wealth and power
in America knows, this is a rather amazing statement. In 1960,
according to John Blair's definitive study The Control of Oil,
the Rockefeller family had controlling interest in three of the
top seven oil companies in America, and four of the top eight in
the world. They were also in control of Chase Manhattan Bank, one
of the biggest in the nation then and the largest today. They
also owned the single most expensive piece of re

them both back in the public eye.
There is another problem with Leary's book: the Phil Graham
anecdote. In his book, Leary has Mary tell him that the cat was
out the bag as far as her and JFK were concerned. The reason was
that a well-known friend of hers had blabbed about them in
public. This is an apparent reference to Post owner Phil Graham's
outburst at a convention in Phoenix, Arizona in 1963. This famous
incident (which preceded his later alleged mental breakdown)
included - according to Leary - a reference to Kennedy and Mary
Meyer. The story of Graham's attendance at this convention and
what he did and said has been described in different ways in
different books. Unfortunately for Leary, his dating of the
convention does not jibe with any that I have seen. In 1986, Tony
Chaitkin tracked down the correct date, time, and place of the
meeting. No one had done it correctly up to that time. But
Chaitkin and his associates went one step further. They
interviewed people who were there. None of the attende

let us examine this new pedigree
and show how it fits into the movement outlined above.
Looking for Mr. Kennedy
(And Not Finding Him)
The first anti-Kennedy book in this brood, although not quite a
perfect fit into the genre, is The Search for JFK, by Joan and
Clay Blair Jr. The book appeared in 1976, right after Watergate
and the Church Committee hearings. In the book's foreword, the
authors are frank about what instigated their work:
  During Watergate (which revealed to us the real character of
  President Richard M. Nixon-as opposed to the manufactured
  Madison Avenue image), our thoughts turned to Jack
  Kennedy....Like other journalists, we were captivated by
  what was then called the "Kennedy mystique" and the
  excitement of "the New Frontier." Now we began to wonder.
  Behind the image, what was Jack really like? Could one, at
  this early date, cut through the cotton candy and find the
  real man? (p. 10)
In several ways, this is a revealing passage. First of all, the
authors apparently accept the Washington Post version of
Watergate-i.e. that Nixon, and only Nixon, was responsible for
that whole range of malfeasance and that Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein got to the bottom of it. Second, it seems to me 

's reaction to Kennedy's supposed White House
affairs. Consider the following excerpt based on Kelley:
  She knew far more about these goings-on than he ever
  suspected and dealt with them through hauteur, as when she
  disdainfully handed him some panties she'd found in her
  pillow slip, saying, "Here, would you find out who these
  belong to. They're not my size. (Ibid)
With this kind of standard I'm surprised the authors did not use
that other ersatz Kelley "bombshell" about Jackie, namely that
JFK's affairs drove her to electroshock therapy.
Many of the sexual anecdotes go unsourced, but there is one that
is footnoted that is quite revealing. The authors use it as a
coda to a chapter on Jack's early years in the House. This
passage synthesizes the image they wish to depict: Kennedy as the
empty vessel of his father who had his role as politician forced
on him after Joe Junior's death and who now uses sex as a release
from his own vacuity. It deserves to be quoted at length:
  The whole th

what had been a right-wing, eccentric, easily
dismissed undercurrent, picked up a second wind-so much so that
today it is not an eccentric undercurrent at all. It is accepted
by a large amount of people. And, most surprisingly, some of its
purveyors are even accepted within the confines of the research
community.
The three threads are these:
     1.   That the Kennedys ordered Castro's assassination, despite
       the verdict of the Church Committee on the CIA's assassination
       plots. As I noted last issue, the committee report could find no
       evidence indicating that JFK and RFK authorized the plots on
       Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, or Ngo
       Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
     2.   That the Kennedys were really "bad boys," in some ways as
       bad as Chicago mobsters or the "gentleman killers" of the CIA.
       Although neither JFK nor RFK was lionized by the main centers of
       the media while they were alive, because of their early murders,
       many books and articles were written afterward that presented
       them in a sympathetic light, usually as liberal icons. This was
       tolerated by the media establishment as sentimental sop until the
       revelations of both Watergate and the Church Committee. This
       "good guy" image then needed to be altered since both those
       crises seemed to reveal that the Ken

pursuant to its powers under the Uniting for Peace Resolution
(1950). The U.S. and U.K. aggressor military occupation forces should be
removed immediately from Iraq. This is exactly what happened in the 1956
Middle East "war" when the U.N. General Assembly deployed the United
Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to the Sinai in order to facilitate the
withdrawal of aggressor military forces by the United Kingdom, France


War II international legal order rested.34 Nazi Ideology
Iraq had been continuously and illegally bombed by the United States and
the United Kingdom since the end of the Bush Sr. Gulf War in 1991 under
the pretext of enforcing unauthorized and clearly illegal no-fly
zones.35 But in order to accomplish their objective of seizing Iraq
outright, the Bush Jr. warmongers had to articulate another operational
rationale for a war of aggression that they could then sell to the
American People and Congress that was separate and apart from their
fatuous "war against international terrorism."36 So they resurrected the
long-ago discredited Nazi doctrine of "preventive warfare," once again
using the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001 as a pretext for doing
so. The first overt step in their plan was the Bush Jr. aggressive
threat to Iraq uttered during the course of his State of the Union
Address to the United States Congress on 29 January 2002, branding Iraq
as part of some so-called "axis of evil" along with Iran and North
Korea.37 By means of employing this provocative language harkening back
to the World War II "axis" of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial
Japan, the Bush Jr. administration was deliberately preparing the ground
for bogus claims to launch preventive wars against all three of these
U.N. Member States. Iraq was at the top of the Bush Jr. hit-list because
it had been materially and psychologically debilitated by over a decade
of genocidal economic sanctions imposed upon its people by the United
Nations Security Council acting at the behest of the United States and
the United Kingdom since 1990. Iraq and its oil fields were finally ripe
for the imperial picking by Bush Jr. and his right-hand henchman Tony
Blair. By contrast N

the United Nations Organization
itself has become to the imperialist enterprises of the United States
government.51 Corrupting and corroding world order wherever it goes.
Throughout this sordid affair, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
basically operated as an errand-boy for the United States government
despite the requirements of Chapter XV of the U.N. Charter establishing
the U.N. Secretariat as one of the six independent organs of the United
Nations Organization, and in particular, of Charter article 100,
paragraph 1 mandating the absolute independence of the Secretary General
and the U.N. Secretariat from taking instructions by any U.N. Member
State: In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the
staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from
any other authority external to the Organization. They shall refrain
from any action which might reflect on their position as international
officials responsible only to the Organization.
For these reasons, the United Nations Organization was quickly perceived
to be aiding and abetting the criminal U.S./U.K. belligerent occupation
regime in Iraq and thus an appropriate target for attack by Iraqi
resistance forces. Hence the 19 August 2003 car-bombing of the U.N.
Headquarters in Baghdad with its horrendous loss of human lives should
have come as no surprise to anyone. Then Bush Jr. and Kofi Annan
publicly shed some crocodile tears for the U.N. personnel victims of
that tragedy, for which the former bear joint and several responsibility
with the perpetrators. Of course the U.N. Secretary General and the U.N.
Secretariat have operated as proxies for the United States government
for at least the past decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union.52
And the complicity of the United N

contained. To begin to
explain why, let me summarize the account about the matter given
by Bradlee in his 1995 autobiography A Good Life.
The night of the Meyer murder, at his home, Bradlee got a call
from Anne Truitt, Mary's artist friend and then the wife of Jim
Truitt, Newsweek's Tokyo correspondent. Mary had told Anne to
retrieve the diary in case anything happened to her. The next
morning, Ben and Tony went to Mary's house. Once inside they
discovered James Angleton there (Bradlee provides no explanation
as to why he was there). No diary is found. But later in the day
the Bradlees decide to go to Mary's art studio which is down the
alley in their garage. They again discover Angleton there in the
process of picking the lock. Embarrassed, the super spook walks
off. The Bradlees make a pass through the studio and don't find
the diary. But an hour later, Tony secured it. In Bradlee's
telling, there is only a diary. Bradlee writes that, although
Kennedy's name was not in it, it was clear that he was the person
having an affair with her. Bradlee decides not to make the diary
public and a day or so later, gives it to Angleton because he
felt he would be able to ensure that it would be permanently
destroyed. Years later, when Tony Bradlee asked Angleton how he
had destroyed the diary, he admitted he hadn't. She demands it
back. He gives it to her and she burns it with a friend (not
named) as a witness.
Bradlee's version was sharply criticized in a letter to the Los
Angeles Times published on November 12, 1995. The letter was from
Anne Truitt and Angleton's widow Cicely. They write that Mary's
instructions to Anne had been that the diary should be entrusted
to James Angleton himself and that Anne Truitt called for
Angleton that night and found him at Bradlee's house (it's not
specified how she found 

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

this note is immediately struck with "women's underthings
stuffed into the crevices of the sofa" (p. 189) and a "half-eaten
hamburger hidden behind books on the mantel" (Ibid). The problem
here is there is no source given for the first observation and
the hamburger is sourced to none other than CIA-Washington Post
crony Joe Alsop, the man who, as Don Gibson pointed out, talked
LBJ into forming the Warren Commission (Probe Vol. 3 #4 pp. 28-
30).
This is typical of the book's low scholarly standard. Both
authors have advanced degrees from Cal Berkeley. Both had done
some solid academic work in their Ramparts days. Yet neither has
any qualms about the Exner or Mary Meyer stories. In fact they
both jump on the Timothy Leary addition to the latter ( p. 355).
This tabloid approach allows them to use none other than Kitty
Kelley on Jackie's reaction to Kennedy's supposed White House



  The whole thing with him was pursuit. I think he was
  secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that
  the low esteem in which he held women wa