American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [30]
Bernstein’s article began by describing how Joseph Alsop, a leading syndicated columnist, had gone to the Philippines in 1953 to cover an election, at the CIA’s request. It would be Alsop, transcripts of President Johnson’s taped telephone conversations later revealed, who first urged LBJ to form the Warren Commission to answer any unresolved doubts about the assassination. “Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters,” Bernstein wrote. “Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.”
The article went on: “James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency’s head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist-operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous missions; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.”
Among the CIA’s most valuable relationships in the 1960s, Bernstein continued, was a Miami News reporter who covered Latin America named Hal Hendrix. He regularly provided information about individuals within Miami’s Cuban exile community. He was the conduit through which the CIA passed word to then-Senator Kenneth Keating that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba in 1962, and got awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Missile Crisis. On the afternoon of the assassination, another reporter, Seth Kantor, has said that Hendrix provided him considerable yet-unrevealed information about Oswald’s history—including his supposed defection to Russia and his activities with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The setup seems to have been “on,” and it involved the media.
The cover-up still does. After the House Assassinations Committee concluded late in 1978 that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” the New York Times buried the story—“Experts Say That Second Gunman Almost Certainly Shot at Kennedy”—on page 37, right alongside the classified ads. Later, a Times editorial said that the committee seemed “more interested in inflaming than informing.” And whenever there were intimations of conspiracy in the media, the finger pointed elsewhere—like a CBS documentary, “The CIA’s Secret Army,” which strongly hinted that Fidel Castro had ordered Kennedy’s murder in retaliation for the attempts on his own life.
When Oliver Stone’s movie JFK came out in 1991, the strongest attacks came from news outlets and journalists “with the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the flawed Warren Commission inquiry.”23 Are we surprised? They’ll cheerlead for Posner’s and Bugliosi’s books, but I’ll bet you a free lunch they’re not going to be reviewing this one anytime soon.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
One lesson we can take away from the tragedy in Dallas is that the federal government shouldn’t be allowed to supersede state and local laws, when it comes to having an “official” investigation into events as momentous as a presidential assassination or a terrorist attack. We also need to pay close attention to how our big media stopped doing their job as the eyes and ears of our democracy, refusing to acknowledge that something might be going on beyond a “lone nut” assassin. The pattern of denial continues, and we the people must demand thorough