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From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) |
The debate over who writes history and what it consists of has now been raised another notch in the JFK case. A new book has been published on Oliver Stone by University Press of Kansas. We report on this important and interesting volume as our cover story in this issue. Stone was actually allowed to write rebuttals to the critiques of his historical films as included. We concentrate here on, of course, the films most relevant to our journal, JFK and Nixon. The writers on these particular films were Michael Kurtz, George McGovern, Stephen Ambrose, and Arthur Schlesinger. As we note the book is important for at least two reasons. Clearly, the debate about "historical veracity" is an adjunct to the controversy, which blunted the film's impact in the media at the time of release. Second, the discussion of the films are astonishingly bereft of any great reliance, or small reliance, on the sensational revelations made in the declassified record by the Assassination Records Review Board. Only Kurtz and Stone make reference to that record. Such is the crisis of the historians over a monumentally important even of contemporary history.
The Department of Justice has now issued its report on the Martin Luther King case. No surprise, it has found no solid reasons reinvestigate that case based on its so-called "threshhold investigation." This is even more ironic in the wake of the Memphis trial which, as we reported, found a conspiracy in the King case. Mike Vinson interviewed Jerry Ray, brother of the alleged assassin, who sounds off on this new verdict. We are preparing another article for our next issue on a point by point rebuttal to the DOJ verdict.
Our publication has tried to focus a lot of attention on the ill-fated journey of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the last official investigation of the JFK murder. We have done critical articles on that body and have also published interviews with participants like Gaeton Fonzi and Richard Sprague, done by University of Wisconsin professor John Williams. John is doing a book on the HSCA and he has graciously allowed us to print some of the interviews he has done in preparation for that book. In this issue, we excerpt portions of his interview with Tom Downing, the former congressman from Virginia who did a lot to get that investigation going and who served as the first chairperson of the committee itself.
Lisa Pease begins another of her in-depth investigations into the JFK case. Lisa has been immersed in newly declassified files relating to the legendary James Angleton, former chief of counterintelligence (CI) at CIA. Of late, Angleton has been the focus of a lot of light by assassination researchers since John Newman made several new discoveries him concerning both the placement of Oswald's 201 file and the alleged assassin's journey to Mexico City. Lisa merges this new material with information already in the record and finds much to draw our attention. She attempts to answer the key questions of who Oswald was employed by and why his files ended up in Angleton's domain. She will continue this article in the next issue.
Arlene Tyner's series on the CIA and mind control has generated a controversial response from some of our readers. In this third installment, she exposes the human toll from experimentation and considers a possible connection with some of the more sensational and controversial serial killers of our time. Did the CIA move tests out of its own facilities and into prisons, hospitals, and cults? Decide for yourself. The question has been asked before and is reiterated here.
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