Stonekettle Station: Bang Bang Sanity

Stonekettle Station: Bang Bang Sanity

The Secret Service and JFK

The Tampa Scenario:  The Kennedy Assassination and The Secret Service Whitewash

JFK, to San Antonio Congressman Henry Gonzalez on 11/21/63:   

"The Secret Service told me that they had taken care of 

everything - there's nothing to worry about." 

                                                                       by

                                                             John Harris

          Soon after the Warren Commission convened, the compelling question emerged as to why there were no Secret Service Agents riding on the back of the Lincoln Continental carrying President Kennedy during the Dallas motorcade to protect, and if necessary, to take a bullet for the President.  Later, as more facts presented themselves, there were other glaring omissions of security.  We have clear evidence that a key member of his protection team, specifically ATSAIC Emory Roberts, initiated a stand down that left Kennedy unprotected when he waved Secret Service agent Donald Lawton off the back of the Lincoln in well documented footage of the motorcade leaving Love Field.  Except for a couple of instances when Clint Hill jumped on the back of the Lincoln just before making the dogleg turn through Dealey Plaza, there is no evidence of any agents riding on the back of the Lincoln during the ride through the densely packed streets of Dallas.  There were only four motorcycle cops riding behind the Lincoln, and absolutely no police presence on the rooftops or anywhere else along the motorcade route.                                                                                                  According to Vincent Palamara in his book, Survivors Guilt, this kind of rooftop police presence was a normal security procedure for motorcades in other cities including Milwaukee in 1962(see Milwaukee Sentinel-May, 9^th 1962), in Tampa on November 18, 1963, in San Antonio November 21st, and that morning in Fort Worth on the day of the assassination.  In his exhaustive study of the Secret Service’s actions on the trip to Dallas, Palamara explores the various areas in which the Secret Service’s protections of Kennedy were incomprehensibly non-existent that day.   Apparently the Warren commission had taken notice as well and decided to depose the Director of the Secret Service James J. Rowley.  Perhaps in an attempt to at least partially forestall the inconvenient and embarrassing questions to come, Rowley had five agents including Jerry Behn, Floyd Boring, Emory Roberts, John Ready and Clint Hill submit reports on the particular matter of agents riding on the back of the Lincoln.  Behn in particular was quoted as saying unequivocally in his report that JFK “told me that he did not want agents riding on the back of his car”.  The other agent’s reports corroborated what Behn said in no uncertain terms: Kennedy had demanded no agents riding on the back of the Lincoln during the motorcade that had traveled through Tampa on November 18^th.                       Equally embarrassing was the incident the night before the assassination when, according to the columnist Drew Pearson, several agents were spotted drinking in a Fort Worth “beatnik” club called The Cellar.  Earl Warren was infuriated when he found out that Rowley and certain counsel on the commission tried to omit mention of this violation of Secret Service protocol when he exclaimed to Rowley during examination, “Don’t you think that if a man went to bed reasonably early, and hadn’t been drinking the night before, he would be more alert than if he stayed up until 3,4, 5 o’clock in the morning, going to ‘beatnik’ joints and doing some drinking along the way?”  Rowley stammered his way through a series of excuses before exclaiming, “we don’t condone their actions, nor do we try to belittle the violation.  But in the circumstances, I took the decision that I thought right…I don’t think these people should be blamed for the tragedy.”(pg377, shenon) Ultimately, despite consul’s objections, Warren compelled them to include mention of this incident in the final version of the Warren Commission Report.                                                                                                        As Palamara became more obsessed with the possibility of Secret Service complicity in the assassination, he made a startling discovery when he interviewed Secret Service Agent Jerry Behn on the telephone back in 1992 just before Behn died.  To quote Palamara, Behn told him, ‘I don’t remember Kennedy ever saying that he didn’t want anybody on the back of his car.’  Behn added that “newsreel footage from the period will bear him out…“.   This ‘myth’ of Kennedy using presidential prerogative to limit his protection so that he might gain greater access to the people probably began with William Manchester’s book, Death of a President:  "Kennedy grew weary of seeing bodyguards roosting behind him every time he turned around, and in Tampa on November 18 (1963), just four days before his death, he dryly asked Agent Floyd Boring to 'keep those Ivy League charlatans off the back of the car.' Boring wasn't offended. There had been no animosity in the remark." (1988 Harper & Row/Perennial Library edition, pp. 37-38)                                                                                   Palamara claims that in a separate interview Floyd Boring essentially told him same thing, “ ‘He quotes me?’ Boring asked incredulously. ‘I never told him that. He (JFK) was a very nice man…never interfered with us at all.’ “ Boring also confided to Palamara that he was never even interviewed by interviewed by Manchester in the first place.                                                                                In 2010, Gerald Blaine along with co-writer Lisa McCubbin, published a crude “factionalization” called The Kennedy Detail.  It is nothing more than an apologia and a veiled attack on Palamara’s work, conspicuously mounting a nostalgic and anecdotal “blame the victim” defense of the Secret Service.  He lays the foundation for a whitewash at the beginning of his book when he asserts, “the Secret Service was not authorized to override a presidential decision”.(Blaine, p. 17)  Blaine hints broadly, without actually coming right out and saying it, that Kennedy was somehow complicit in his own assassination because he issued orders not only preventing the SS agents from riding on the back of the limousine but also by reducing the number of local police motorcycle escorts to only four.  Palamara theorizes that this cover story as elaborated to Manchester, could well have originated with agent Emory Roberts since he was one of the few Secret Service agents in Dallas that day that were actually interviewed by Manchester. By the time the agents had written their reports for Rowley, having obviously hashed out and clarified their stories so that they were all on the same page, the entire Secret Service must have been on high alert.  J. Edgar Hoover had long coveted taking over presidential protection from the Secret Service and Kennedy’s death may well have presented an opportunity.  Palamara further contends that an ongoing conspiracy soon evolved to whitewash these derelictions of duty and to portray President Kennedy as a reckless and un-cooperative subject who constantly stymied their efforts to protect him.                                                        Blaine goes out of his way to insist that the new stand down “policy” or “Tampa Scenario” began the week before in Tampa when he basically lifts the quote about “ivy league charlatans” from Manchester’s book and embellishes it liberally: “He (Kennedy) suddenly bent down because of the motorcycle noise,” purportedly to give Floyd Boring the word to stay off the back of the Lincoln. “The whole purpose of the motorcade was political and Floyd knew that Kennedy did not want to be shielded from the public.” After a few more sentences of superfluous disambiguation, Blaine gets to the point; “In the three years he’d been with JFK, he’d never heard the president call the agents off the back of the car in the middle of a motorcade. Apparently politics was trumping the Secret Service.”  (Blaine, p. 148).                                                                                                                                     Even the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire embellishes and adds to this “death wish” myth when the psycho assassin played by John Malkovich declares to Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service character “you wanted to station agents on his bumpers and sideboards: he refused.  And do you know why I think he refused?  He had a death wish.”   Somehow the counter-myth of Kennedy being a reckless, death obsessed fatalist gained momentum over the years until it became accepted fact.  Kennedy’s alleged decision to ban agents from the running boards and back of the car, combined with his so-called obsession with death, has become so prevalent that it is even referred to in popular movies.  Although there is some truth to the often repeated notion that Kennedy was impulsive and had a tendency to rush toward crowds, especially women and groups of children, there are ample news pictures, video and film footage of the president well protected by agents and local PD on motorcycle during his trip to Tampa.  There had been explicit threats against the president’s life in Tampa by the likes of Joseph Milteer, who, not two weeks before, had been quoted as predicting Kennedy’s being shot “from an office building with a high powered rifle” to an FBI informant.   Why would Kennedy, as Blaine would have it, when his back was so delicate and he constantly wore a back brace which inhibited his range of movements, “bend down” to give instructions to Floyd Boring ordering the agents to get off the back of the car?  So that people could see his back as the Lincoln drove away?            
          Blaine, having admitted that Kennedy had never complained about agents standing on the back of the Lincoln, doesn’t lend credence to his contention that Kennedy suddenly and arbitrarily made the demand for them to stay off in Tampa.  His constant novelized recreations of conversations, exchanges between the president and other agents that he couldn’t he couldn’t possibly been privy to, while planting thoughts, emotions and motivations into the heads of his various secret service cohorts stretches credibility.  Blaine is an old man on a mission.  He makes it seem as if he were at the center of the chain of command, when he was a very junior agent with only a few years under his belt.    Palamara contradicts Blaine with this exchange during the tape recorded interview exchange with Floyd Boring who seems to suggest how he may have inadvertently created the impression that Kennedy wanted the agents off of the back of the Lincoln:  “No, no, no-that’s not true…(JFK) was a very easy going guy…he didn’t interfere with our actions at all.  He actually—No, I told them…He didn’t tell them anything…He just—I looked at the back and I seen these fellahs were Hanging on the limousine—I told them to return to the car.”  Palamara also provides other evidence to refute the Tampa Scenario.  Perhaps the most salient testimony comes from former Florida Congressman Samuel Melville Gibbons who was in the limousine with Senator George Smathers and Kennedy during Tampa motorcade and stated to Palamara by letter that, “I rode with Kennedy every time he rode.  I heard no such order.  As I remember it the agents rode on the rear bumper all the way.”   Is it possible that a misunderstanding about Boring’s actions developed into a full-blown cover story once the worst had happened and Kennedy was dead?  Ultimately, the Tampa scenario takes on the aspect of a hastily scripted alibi, as does the use of the phrase “Ivy League charlatans” which smacks of an embarrassing attempt at literary license to imitate Kennedy’s style and sense of humor. 

                           Blaine even provides a convenient answer to explain the famous footage taken at Love Field showing Agent Don Lawton being told to stand down by Emory Roberts from trailing the President’s Lincoln.   Apparently Lawton is simply saying, “It’s all yours now, guys.  I’ve done my job.  Now get out of here so I can have some lunch?” as he waved his arms at Roberts in bewilderment.  If you view the increasing vehemence of Lawton’s protestations as he raises his arms three times you can certainly interpret the urgency and bewilderment otherwise.

 Works cited:

A Cruel and Shocking Act by Philip Shenon

Survivors Guilt by Vincent Palamara

The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine

Death of A President by William Manchester       

Get a brain! Morans!

The emergence of the Fox media fueled Tea Party, the modern day version of the 19th century nativist "Know Nothing" party has inspired legions of contemporary nitwits to get involved in our sacred political process. One look at this infamous image from back in 2003, way before the tea party, reminds me that the unholy alliance between the naive constituency of Tea Party enthusiasts and the cynical amalgam of corporate interests like the Koch Brothers, FOX TV, military industrial conglomerates and the like, has many historical and popular precursors. We could mention William Jennings Bryan and his famous populist whistle stop presidential campaign of 1896 against William McKinley, which probably attracted most of their supporters from the ancestors of folks like this man. Sadly, within the modern Tea Party there is no equivalent to the eloquent and very socialist leaning Bryan who, despite being out spent by the Mark Hanna led Republican campaign machine by 10 to 1, gave the Republicans a good run for their money. The support for Bryan came mostly from farmers and rural folk who felt victimized by the railroads and the eastern banks and wanted to regulate the railroads and also wanted to make silver the standard of currency instead of gold. Although Bryan was called the "Prairie Marxist", he was a social conservative who believed in a strict fundamentalist Christianity and unfortunately is mostly remembered for his prosecution of Tennessee school teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution. How little things have changed really, except nowadays political hybrids like Bryan are almost non existent. This picture also reminds me of the Frank Capra movie Meet John Doe, which depicted a Tea Party like mass movement that is cynically manipulated by a greedy industrialist and his newspaper flunkies, with the way that the right wing media has exploited the ignorance of hundreds of thousands of lower middle class white Americans who are uneducated and evidently don't even know how to spell the word "moron". These media flunkies like Glenn Beck(presently unemployed), Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, lead the charge and the uneducated red state hoi polloy are the cannon fodder who mindlessly follow. After all, they still have to go home to their trailer park sewage pits after the rally is over so what better way than to top it off but with a couple of 40 oz. Cobra's and a couple of hits of crank, right? These are also the descendants of the same "upcountry folk" who fought in the American Civil War (the rich man's war and the poor man's fight) to save the south for the slavocracy.

AMENSTY: Isn't that the kind of place a bachelor lives in? Not trying to be unduly harsh with Grandma here but didn't she ever hear about spellchecker? Or buy a dictionary? She will probably vote for Michelle Bachmann because while she might be a bit on the illiterate side, Frau Bachmann is highly intelligent, if somewhat unpolished. And you know what? I bet she doesn't even care that Michelle's husband is gay, although he pretends to be "cured" of his homosexuality. I wonder if William Jennings Bryan is spinning in his grave right now as we speak? I don't want to seem cruel but Granny needs to break out the Dick and Jane primers from her school days and start learning about how to spell. Meanwhile those Mexicans who clean her yard every year need a place to sleep that has running water and heat. They need a place to sleep other than that interstate overpass that they have been living under all summer. Perhaps she could show a little more kindness to those Mexicans, instead of wanting to stigmatize them for wanting a better life...

Remember when Marlon Brando said "the Horror, the Horror..." in Apocalypse Now? We'll here is our Tea party equivalent: "Oh the Borror, the Borror..." I hope the esteemed economist holding this sign hasn't defaulted on his South Dakota GE money credit card(full disclosure: I'm still holding on to mine. I have had it since seven years ago when I started getting on my feet from a financial catastrophe. Question: Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to have credit cards at all? To rent cars and hotel rooms? Wouldn't it be great if the banks didn't control everything of a financial nature?) This gentleman is obviously not a Keynesian enthusiast. But I ask you, where would he be without the GE credit card? Life is tough and my New Years resolution is to get rid of those balances on my credit cards...

This last one Baffles me: This woman looks like a Mexican, or an Asian, or a Native American. Yet here she wants to "Impeah" Obama. Does she mean "Impeach" or "Impede"? Little of both maybe? I guess this last picture goes to show that you don't have to be white to be stupid, but, HELLO, sorry sweetheart, this country has been "socialist" since 1935 when president Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It has become quite clear to me that these nitwits who are the innocent and not so innocent pawns of the vast right wing media to hijack the country's attention and the congress while holding the vast majority of the rest of us hostage to their greedy agenda. Thus they legitimize the Tea Party's agenda and in the words of Martha Rossler, make it seem as if it stems "from the anti-elitist heartland, 'the real America', a kind of righteously raging beast that must be placated. The excuse of the mob offers the appearance of urgency to a persistent campaign by plutocratic elites to permanently capture the wealth of the nation--now at the greatest divide between rich and poor in a century--and to subvert democratic institutions while posing as vox populi..."

What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic (June 2009)

What Makes Us Happy? - The Atlantic (June 2009)

The Eagles of Libby Montana

It is almost November and old man winter is breathing down my neck. Already my thoughts are drifting toward summer and a new adventure. Yet I get ahead of myself sometimes. I've been reading portions of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and I'm drawn to thoughts of one of my friends who is now, as we speak, finishing off a cabin he is building not too far from Libby Montana. It's actually closer to Troy Montana but since this post was intended to be written about Libby, I shall confine my observations to the town of Libby, where I spent two days during my trip to Montana last summer. The reason I mention my friend(or Walden for that matter) is that he is the one who introduced me to Montana three years ago. Now Bruce, that's his name, is something of a solid fellow; a decent harmonica player even though he is tone deaf, a fan of Steinbeck(especially Cannery Row!) and pretty stubborn about finishing off what he starts. Last spring he said he was going to buy land in Montana and build a Cabin there. I know this blog is supposed to be about Libby, but bear with me, I think I'll be able to tie this all up into a neat bundle by the end of this post.

Anyway, I'll be damned if he hasn't gone and done it! I can understand why he has. Montana is like Coney Island, it is more of a state of mind than a geographic location. I would buy land and build a cabin there myself but why bother when I can just move in on my friend Bruce

(assuming he still is after he reads this post)and

stay in his cabin. after all what are friends for, right? Actually I'm just kidding about this. My couch surfing days ended many years ago.

. Getting back to Libby, there is an interesting story about the town and how it was victimized and exploited by the W.R. Grace Company for a

period of time. Now as you may have guessed, Libby, in addition to being a mining/logging town is also a nesting spot for American Bald Eagles. There is even a website that you can go to, www.libbyeagelecam.com, to follow the latest adventures of some of the local eagle residents.

I guess I should tell you about the W.R. Grace Company at this point. Back in 1881 gold miners discovered vermiculite in and around Libby. By 1920 the Zonolite company began mining the vermiculite for use in fertilizer and building insulation. W.R. Grace bought the operation in 1963 and according employee memo's unearthed by investigative journalists, was aware of the asbestos problem even back then. Turns out that the vermiculite was contaminated with a "highly toxic form of naturally occurring asbestos called tremolite actinolite asbestiform mineral fibers". Sounds pretty toxic to me. Being the good citizens that they were, Grace continued to mine the vermiculite as long as they could while covering up word of the contamination. Then after they sold the mine, for a long time denied any responsibility for the staggering health problem created from the asbestos. It is estimated that upwards of 1000 people in the Libby Troy area have died from asbestoses. A proposed criminal indictment to try executives from Grace was recently dismissed however on June 17, 2009 the EPA declared it's first ever health emergency at the asbestos site. Grace is beginning to pony up finally after being in offical denial for almost twenty years.

Well, getting back to the eagles, they kind of symbolize the spirit of the people in Libby, a town that may have been on the ropes thanks W.R. Grace, but has gotten up off the mat and is ready to dance for a couple more rounds. Here's an example of the kind of businesses that have sprung up in Libby recently:

Little Mom and Pop stores of one description or another, valiantly trying to survive in the post Bush depression era. My friend Bruce has told me that he regularly sees grizzly bears and mountain lions wander across his property. He is living his dream up there in Montana while I'm dodging cars in the Key Food parking lot here in Brooklyn. All things considered I think I'd trust my chances with the grizzly bears and the mountain lions.

Healthcare and the Paranoid Style

With regard to the coming battle over health care, Obama's declining popularity in the polls and the fear of including a government option, this despite the fact that 40 percent of health care is already run by the government, I would like to quote from Richard Hofstadter from his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics: "...much of our national anxiety can be traced to the fear that the decline of entrepreneurial competition will destroy our national character, or that the same effect will be brought about by our hedonistic mass culture and by the moral laxity that has grown up with and is charged to our liberal and relativistic intellectual climate." In other words, the real economic issues, other than "higher taxes", become obfuscated by so called cultural issues i.e. family values, abortion, secular versus religious morality etc. in a shit storm of calculated and cynical bluster and hot air as put forth by the right wing media, and as supported by the lobbyists, special interests and their stooge politicians who are bought and paid for by these interests. They dial up the fear and hysteria, overstate the obvious, invert the arguments of the opposition, exagerate or twist the intentions of many facets of the health care bill and when all else fails, they lie through their teeth.

According to Hofstadter, none of this is new. Two hundred years ago they were slandering the Masons and the Illuminati. Then it was the Catholics(read immigrants!), the Jews(international Jewish banking conspiracy), and then it was the labor movement, the communists, and now "terrorist's". By the way, while you're at it, why don't you go ask someone in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Kabul or Islamabad who the terrorist's are? You probably won't like the answer, but this is the way much of the world thinks of us as. The Paranoid Style is alive and well.

No City for Old Men

Most of Butte Montana looks like a Walker Evans photograph. The buildings, and many of the people, look as if they had been preserved by a time warp. In the middle of an average business day, the streets are virtually empty. The normal hustle and bustle of a thriving metropolis is absent. Coffee huts and cottage industries of one sort or another dot the landscape. But ultimately, Butte is embroiled in a desperate struggle to survive; to create an identity for itself as a living museum for what was once the greatest mining city in the world.As of this writing, the only active mine in Butte is the Continental Pit. In a city which boasted Morgan Earp as a policemen and where the writer Dashiell Hammett worked as an operative for the Pinkertons in 1917.  He would resign from the Pinkertons when he became disillusioned with their union busting tactics, probably after the murder of IWW organizer Frank Little that same year by six masked men.  No surprise that the crime was never solved.  The preservation of Butte's once thriving mining history, with its glorious intrigues, labor disputes and violence, has become the predominant industry in Butte.

Today, the primary inhabitants of Butte seem to be poverty stricken men who wander the streets aimlessly in search of something to do. I suspect that a lot of disabled men and women end up in Butte because of the cheap housing.  I observed this fellow poking his head into various shops and then proceeding as if he were in a great hurry, but seemingly, with nothing actually to do. The only places where business seemed to be booming were the local taverns, where I could hear loud boisterous conversations and raucous laughter. During the bust year of 1893, the year that silver crashed and many banks closed, there were 212 saloons in operation in Butte, proving once again that during times of economic hardship, the entertainment and

hospitality industries thrive.

Approximately 40 abandoned mining rigs dot the landscape of Butte. Each night they are lit up in red. To the east of town, Our Lady of the Rockies, a ninety foot statue can also be lit up at night for a small fee to honor a departed loved. The installation of the lady, a cross denominational effort, is purportedly in honor of all mothers.

Perhaps she is a reflection of the city's diversity. Irish, Italian, Finnish, Chinese, Eastern

European, Jewish, Black and who knows how many other ethnicity's worked in and around the

mines.

Today the artifacts of these various cultures can be found strewn all over the city. A kind of "Italian" coffee shop on S Montana street called the Palace serves mostly generic American food while subjecting the eater to the sounds of Al Martino, Perry Como, Jerry Vale. All of a

sudden the lyrics from theMichael Maltese song Attsa Matta for You, from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon A Hound forTrouble wafted across the room:

Attsa matter, attsa matter??

Hey!!

At'sa matter for you?

You eata my raviola

And my pasta fagiole too

I'mma give you caccitore

and a pizza that's good to chew

Attsa matter you no like??

Hey!!

Attsa matter for you??

The skewed angularities and planes of many of the images I am showing you are in part caused by the limitations of the lens on my camera, but many of them also reflect the nature of the age and infirmity of many of the buildings in Butte. I think that some of them are so old and neglected, not to mention that they have been built on steep hills, that they are literally sinking into the ground.

Maybe it's just my imagination.

The miners union organized their first strike when the "Copper Kings" decided to cut wages from $3.50 to $3.00 a day. No doubt these trust magnates would still be paying us three dollars a day if it wasn't for the heroic efforts of the Wobblies and other unionists. The worst mining fire in American history occurred in Butte on Nov. 16, 1917. 168 miners were killed. The "Copper Kings" finally consolidated their interests and formed the monolithic Anaconda Copper Company. It's ironic that they named themselves after a snake that kills its victims by strangling the life out of them.