From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)

From the Chairman's Desk

The Assassination Records Review Board has issued its Final Report and has now permanently disbanded. In the wake of the ending of this momentous process, two things remained to be done. First, to actually read and analyze that report, and secondly, to start going through the new documents. No surprise, the major media failed to do either. Which, as usual, leaves it up to us. Lisa Pease has gone through the report and presents the good and bad points about it. It seems to show the influence of the Board members more than the staff. Which was not the case with the previous report issued in early 1997 seeking an extension on the original three-year mandate. We suspect the influence of Henry Graff in this regard. We also cover the media reception given to the termination of the Review Board and the amazing non-coverage given to the actual report. The spinmeisters were out in force, i.e. Bill Buckley, George Will, Gerald Posner etc. And, of course, with the help of The Nation, point man Max Holland was out beating the bushes for the reinstatement of the verdict of the Warren Commission.

Regarding the new documents, some of the most extraordinary evidence produced by the Board was the investigation of the autopsy done by former counsel Jeremy Gunn. This work proved so troubling for the establishment that Posner had to take special aim at distorting it in his Newsweek article. Milicent Cranor points out why this had to be done in her article in this issue. As many have suspected, including staffers on the Board, it is highly unlikely that the photos of JFK’s brain are genuine. Cranor’s article begins what will be a long search through the thousands of pages of the Gunn investigation to expose what is probably some of the strongest evidence of a high crime of state in the medical cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.

On other fronts, Probe takes a look at an aspect of JFK’s foreign policy that is usually ignored, i.e. toward the newly freed states of Africa. Congo has been in the news of late, but the origins of that strife have been largely ignored by the press. We illuminate those origins here and show how it relates to JFK’s evolving foreign policy views and how they were overturned by LBJ. In a related story, we also show why Chris Matthews’ book on JFK is not reliable. Another author who is quite questionable is Gus Russo whose new book is probably the worst on the JFK case since Gerald Posner’s. (In fact, in some ways, it is even worse than Case Closed.) Suffice it to say, in contravention of Russo and Posner, if there is one thing that this new medical evidence demonstrates—to the few who needed more convincing—it is that Oswald did not shoot Kennedy. In a follow-up to our two-part article on the House Select Committee, we discuss a document given to us by former CIA employee Brad Ayers which suggests just how limited that probe was. And Mike Vinson gives us another angle on the MLK front with a discussion of that key witness Grace Stephens.

Finally, we would like to apologize to our readers and contributors for the proofreading of our last issue. It was well below standard. The editors were in the process of moving to new locations and we were under a strict deadline in order to be out before the COPA conference in Dallas. This explains the typos and pagination errors. We will do our best to prevent such errors in the future.

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