she had been with no one
else during the whole time, "not ever" she assures us. Trying to
remain a gentleman, I will only refer the reader to approximately
the second half of the book, which details a rather active social
life on her part.

Finally, what raises this latest revelation to a jocular level is
Exner's description of Kennedy's reaction to her pregnancy when
she informs him of the news. Again, let us use Exner's own words
as quoted by Smith:
So Jack said, "Do you think Sam would help us? Would you ask
Sam? Would you mind asking?" I was surprised, but said I'd
ask. So I called Sam and we had dinner. I told him what I
needed. He blew sky-high. "Damn him! Damn that Kennedy." He
loved to be theatrical, and he always enjoyed picking on
Jack.

Smith/Herodotus was so carried away by that cute, cuddly Italian
mobster that she never bothered to ponder the fact that
zillionaires in America have always had quiet, discreet ways to
solve such personal problems. How about a private jet to a
secretive Swiss clinic? They don't need Mafia chieftains to help
them. Especially one with six FBI agents following him around
ready to squeal on Kennedy the minute Hoover wants them to.

Say That Again Please

There is one revelation in the article that does not come off
tongue-in-cheek.

After talking to Smith's pal Hersh, Exner calls Smith back. She
states that the Kennedy-Giancana talks could be released under
the JFK Act. She then adds: "I hope they will. The government
wants me to talk again." [Emphasis add

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 dichotomy that none of
these books cares to acknowledge let alone explore-which reveals
their intent. (An exception is the Blairs' book, which does
acknowledge the split on pp. 608-623.)

In their approach to JFK, Collier and Horowitz take up where the
Blairs left off. In fact, they play up the playboy angle even
more strongly than the Blairs. When Kennedy gets to Washington in
1947, this note is immediately struck with "women's underthings
stuffed into the crevices of the sofa" (p

category forever
by reducing it to tabloid standards. Significantly, the article
was entitled "The Dark Side of Camelot," a phrase used by Ron
Rosenbaum (who will be discussed later) and the title of the
upcoming book by Sy Hersh, of whom Kelley is a great admirer. In
this new version, Exner now said that she was seeing Sam Giancana
at Kennedy's bidding. She even helped arrange meetings between
JFK and Giancana and JFK and Roselli. Some of the meetings took
place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Why would Kennedy need
personal consultation with gangsters like Sam and John? To cinch
elections on his ruthless way to the White House and later to
arrange the liquidation of Castro. Kelley adds that the latter
meetings were done for operation MONGOOSE. But Exner's time
sequence does not jibe with the lifespan of that operation and,
as the record shows, Castro's assassination was not on the
MONGOOSE agenda. In spite of that explicit record, Kelley adds
that historians have never been able to pinpoint Kennedy's role
in those plots, thereby ignoring the abundant evidence unearthed
by the Church Committee which says he had none. Nevertheless,
Kelley and Exner will now exhume the hidden history of those
times for People. Let's examine their excavation.

Exner says that Kennedy needed help in West Virg

builds another scaffolding: he now postulates that Exner
was Kennedy's conduit to the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro (Ibid
p. 324). What is breathtaking about this is that this is
something that not even Exner had uttered yet, at least not for
dissemination. And she won't until her get-together with Kitty
Kelley in the February 1988 cover story for People. This curious
passage leads one to think that Davis may have planted the seed
from which the Kelley story sprouted.

To go through the entire Davis book and correct all the errors of
fact, logic, and commentary would literally take another book.
But, in line with my original argument about anti-Kennedy
biography, I must point out just two parts of Davis' discussion
of JFK's Vietnam policy. The author devotes a small chapter to
this subject. In his hands, Kennedy turns into a hawk on Vietnam.

Davis writes that on July 17, 1963, Kennedy made "his last public
utterance" on Vietnam, saying that the U.S. 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 recor

is apparently off limits for Ron. If
he drew attention to his lack of curiosity on this matter, it
would hint that something is being papered over in order to
conceal a point.

If that were so, then a previous occurrence in Jim Truitt's
career would bear mentioning, since it quite closely resembles
what he did later in 1976. In August of 1961, Truitt had called
Bradlee and said he had evidence that Kennedy had been previously
married before his wedding to Jackie, and that this fact had been
covered up. Both Bradlee and Truitt pursued the story. But before
they printed it they asked Kennedy about it. He referred them to
Pierre Salinger, his press secretary. Salinger had already heard
the charge from rightwing commentator Fulton Lewis. He had all
his points lined up and proved the story false. Bradlee's account
in Conversations With Kennedy (pp. 43-49) seems to suggest that
Truitt and Bradlee still worked on the story after they were
shown it was wrong.

Also intriguing is a flourish added in Rosenbaum's version, which
appears heavily reliant on the Truitts and Angletons as sources.
Rosenbaum writes that Mary's diary, although usually laid upon
her bedroom bookcase, was found in a locked steel box in her
studio. Rosenbaum doesn't probe as to why it was not found in its
usary&resting place. The locked steel box is not a part of any
other version of the story I know, including Tony Bradlee's, and,
in all versions, she supposedly found the diary. Of course, a
locked box suggests intrigue, but it strains reality. Are we to
believe that every time Mary wanted to make

in the Senate was headed by Idaho's Frank Church.
Other leading lights on that committee were Minnesota's Walter
Mondale, Colorado's Gary Hart, Tennessee's Howard Baker, and
Pennsylvania's Richard Schweiker.

As writers Kate Olmsted and Loch Johnson have shown, the Church
Committee was obstructed by two of the CIA's most potent allies:
the major media and friendly public figures. In the latter
category, Olmsted especially highlights the deadly role of Henry
Kissinger. But as Victor Marchetti revealed to me, there was also
something else at work behind the scenes. In an interview in his
son's office in 1993, Marchetti told me that he never really
thought the Agency was in danger at that time. He stated that
first, the CIA had infiltrated the staff of Church's committee
and, second, the Agency was intent on giving up documents only in
certain areas. In Watergate terminology, it was a "limited-
hangout" solution to the problem of controlling the damage.

The Escape Route

The issue that had ignited so

than fiction will sell
better in a market already jaded by exotic overexposure."

Demaris' book on Hoover can only be called sympathetic. This is
immediately indicated by his choice of interviewees. They include
high level FBI administrators like Robert E. Wick, John P. Mohr,
and Mark Felt; former Attorney General Richard Kleindienst;
Hoover publicity flack Louis Nichols who named one of his sons
after his boss; and actor Efrem Zimbalist who starred in ABC's
glamorized series on the Bureau. In the entire book, there are
eight pages on Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO operations, i.e. the
infiltration, disruption, and occasional destruction of domestic
political movements.

In Hoover's disputes with the Kennedys, there can be no doubt
where Demaris stands. Speaking of Hoover's reputed blackmailing
of presidents, he writes: "It is possible that one or two were
intimidated by their own guilty conscience...." He sums up Hoover
by saying, "He was, whatever his failings, an extraordinary man,
truly one of a kind." The above gives

In article ENqtd.176750$cJ3.163057@fed1read06,
PAM says...


I wish I could find carbon comps (decent values) for two cents
each! Those days are long gone around these parts.

Pete


www.mouser.com

looks like a lot of Carbon Film ones are in the 3 cents each price
range to me..... those are 100 lot prices.... so its 3 buks a 100

They are a Dime Each if you wanna onze twoze them ..... so then its
3 buks for 30 of them......

John k9uwa

of modern history. With people like Davis
translating for them, RFK does not pursue Giancana, they are
actually pals in MONGOOSE. The Kennedys agree with the Joint
Chiefs: we should invade Cuba. And then escalate in Vietnam.
Disinformation feeds on disinformation, and whatever the record
shows is shunted aside as the tabloid version becomes "accepted
history," to use Davis' phrase (p. 290). The point of this
blurring of sources is that the Kennedys, in these hands, become
no different than the Dulles brothers, or Nixon, or Eisenhower.
In fact, Davis says this explicitly in his book( pp. 298-99). As
I noted in the last issue, with Demaris and Exner, the Kennedys
are no different than Giancana. And once this is pounded home,
then anything is possible. Maybe Oswald did work for Giancana.
And if RFK was working with Sam, then maybe Bobby unwittingly had
his brother killed. Tragic, but hey, if you play with fire you
get burned. Tsk. Tsk.

But beyond this, there is an even larger gestalt. If the Kennedys
were just Sorenson-wrapped mobsters or CIA officers, then what
difference does it make in history if they were assassinated? The
only people who should care are sentimental Camelot sops like
O'Donnell and Powers who were in it for a buck anyway. Why waste
the time and effort of a new investigation on that. For the CIA,
this is as good as a rerun of the Warren Commission, since the
net results are quite similar. So its no surprise to me that the
focus of Hersh's book has shifted between Oswald did it for the
Mob, and an all out trashing of the Kennedys.

The standard defense by these purveyors is th

public interest in the
hearings had been that of assassination. CIA Director Bill Colby
very clearly drew the line that the CIA had never plotted such
things domestically. Colby's admission was a brilliant tactical
stroke that was not appreciated until much later. First, it put
the focus on the plots against foreign leaders that could be
explained as excesses of anti-communist zealotry (which is
precisely what the drafters of Church's report did). Second, all
probes into the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK would be off-
limits. The Church Committee would now concentrate on the
performance of the intelligence community in investigating the
death of JFK; not complicity in the assassination itself. This
distinction was crucial. As Colby must have understood, the
Agency and its allies could ride out exposure of plots against
Marxists and villains like Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo
and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The exposure of
domestic plots against political leaders would have been lethal.

Colby's gambit, plus the strictures put on the investigation as
outlined by Marchetti above, enabled the intelligence community
to ride out the storm. The path chosen for limited exposure was
quite clever. The most documentation given up by the CIA was on
the Castro assassination plots. Further, the Agency decided to
give up many documents on both the employment of the Mafia to
kill Fidel, and the AM/LASH plots, that is, the enlistment of a
Cuban national close to Castro to try and kill him. Again, not
enough credit has been given to the wisdom of these choices. In
intelligence parlance, there is a familiar phrase: muddying the
waters. This