Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
If you would like to tell the editors about a new book (even your own) that addresses the concerns of HNN -- current events and history -- or would like to write a review, please send us an email: editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
Roger Pulvers: Review of Kokichi Nishimura's The Bone Man of Kokoda
Dan Leon: Review of Bernard Avishai's The Hebrew Republic (Harcourt, 2008)
Barron H. Lerner: Review of Gavin Mortimer’s The Great Swim (Walker, 2008)
Kirk Bane: Review of Zachary Lazar’s Sway (Little, Brown and Company, 2008)
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Luther Spoehr: Review of Mary Lefkowitz, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey (Yale University Press, 2008)
Source: HNN (5-4-08)
Wellesley College’s leafy, green campus just outside Boston seems an unlikely setting for an academic blood feud, but for almost two decades, beginning in the early 1990s, it has been just that. When classicist Mary Lefkowitz challenged the historical accuracy of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (which argued that ancient Greek culture had African—especially Egyptian—roots) and other Afrocentric works that claimed western civilization had basically been stolen from Africa, she found herself at the center of a firestorm that still smolders today. She was denounced as a racist in person and in print and even subjected to an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit for slander by her colleague and chief antagonist, Prof. Anthony Martin, himself a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Chalmers Johnson: Review of Alex Abella's Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (Harcourt)
Source: TomDispatch.com (4-29-08)
[For a brief period in the 1960s, Chalmers Johnson was a RAND consultant. His latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy. To view a short video of Johnson discussing military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy, click here.]
The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.
Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.
Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The publisher of his latest book claims that it is "the first history of the shadowy think tank that reshaped the modern world." Such a history is long overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND's peculiar contributions to the modern world.
Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND's internal struggles -- not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defense's top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.
We need a study that really lives up to Abella's subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been formulated in the post-World War II American empire.
The Air Force Creates a Think Tank
RAND was the brainchild of General H. H. "Hap" Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.
In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.
Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara's "whiz kids" were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Always loyal to the Air Force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers scandal.
Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND's golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.
Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:
"If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all -- the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical."
In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.
For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.
It is also important to note that RAND's analytical errors were not just those of commission -- excessive mathematical reductionism -- but also of omission. As Abella notes, "In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche."
Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and civilian targets.
Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military's top echelons." A typical RAND product of those years was Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization and operation of the Soviet economy.
Collbohm and his colleagues recruited a truly glittering array of intellectuals for RAND, even if skewed toward mathematical economists rather than people with historical knowledge or extensive experience in other countries. Among the notables who worked for the think tank were the economists and mathematicians Kenneth Arrow, a pioneer of game theory; John Forbes Nash, Jr., later the subject of the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind (2001); Herbert Simon, an authority on bureaucratic organization; Paul Samuelson, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947); and Edmund Phelps, a specialist on economic growth. Each one became a Nobel Laureate in economics.
Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein who, according to Abella, made what is "arguably RAND's greatest known -- which is to say declassified -- contribution to American national security: . . .the development of the ICBM as a weapon of war" (he invented the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV); Paul Baran who, in studying communications systems that could survive a nuclear attack, made major contributions to the development of the Internet and digital circuits; and Charles Hitch, head of RAND's Economics Division from 1948 to 1961 and president of the University of California from 1967 to 1975.
Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).
Thinking the Unthinkable
The most notorious of RAND's writers and theorists were the nuclear war strategists, all of whom were often quoted in newspapers and some of whom were caricatured in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (One of them, Herman Kahn, demanded royalties from Kubrick, to which Kubrick responded, "That's not the way it works Herman.") RAND'S group of nuclear war strategists was dominated by Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence and author of Strategy in the Missile Age (1959); Thomas Schelling, a pioneer in the study of strategic bargaining, Nobel Laureate in economics, and author of The Strategy of Conflict (1960); James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975, who was fired by President Ford for insubordination; Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and last but not least, Albert Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.
Abella calls Wohlstetter "the leading intellectual figure at RAND," and describes him as "self-assured to the point of arrogance." Wohlstetter, he adds, "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."
While Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details of Wohlstetter's background, his treatment comes across as a virtual paean to the man, including Wohlstetter's late-in-life turn to the political right and his support for the neoconservatives. Abella believes that Wohlstetter's "basing study," which made both RAND and him famous (and which I discuss below), "changed history."
Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years -- my records are imprecise on this point -- a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb." As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. (India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea, which ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan. Some 189 nations have signed and ratified it.) My last contact with Wohlstetter was late in his life -- he died in 1997 at the age of 83 -- when he telephoned me to complain that I was too "soft" on the threats of communism and the former Soviet Union.
Albert Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University. Like many others of that generation, he was very much on the left and, according to research by Abella, was briefly a member of a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because, as Daniel Ellsberg told Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group was moving the Party's records to new offices and had rented a horse-drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.
After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California, and his wife Roberta began work on her pathbreaking RAND study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), exploring why the U.S. had missed all the signs that a Japanese "surprise attack" was imminent. In 1951, he was recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND's Mathematics Division, where he worked on methodological studies in mathematical logic until Hitch posed a question to him: "How should you base the Strategic Air Command?"
Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the many issues involved in providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, the country's primary retaliatory force in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. What he came up with was a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated basing study. It ran directly counter to the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC, who, in 1945, had encouraged the creation of RAND and was often spoken of as its "Godfather."
In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended -- the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars -- and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that -- even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack -- they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.
Wohlstetter's answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted U.S. military doctrine. One is "second-strike capability," meaning a capacity to retaliate even after a nuclear attack, which is considered the ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first-strike. Another is "fail-safe procedures," or the ability to recall nuclear bombers after they have been dispatched on their missions, thereby providing some protection against accidental war. Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers should be based in the continental United States and able to carry out their missions via aerial refueling, although he did not advocate closing overseas military bases or shrinking the perimeters of the American empire. To do so, he contended, would be to abandon territory and countries to Soviet expansionism.
Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and "hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.
In selling these ideas Wohlstetter had to do an end-run around SAC's LeMay and go directly to the Air Force chief of staff. In late 1952 and 1953, he and his team gave some 92 briefings to high-ranking Air Force officers in Washington DC. By October 1953, the Air Force had accepted most of Wohlstetter's recommendations.
Abella believes that most of us are alive today because of Wohlstetter's intellectually and politically difficult project to prevent a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. He writes:
"Wohlstetter's triumphs with the basing study and fail-safe not only earned him the respect and admiration of fellow analysts at RAND but also gained him entry to the top strata of government that very few military analysts enjoyed. His work had pointed out a fatal deficiency in the nation's war plans, and he had saved the Air Force several billion dollars in potential losses."
A few years later, Wohlstetter wrote an updated version of the basing study and personally briefed Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson on it, with General Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in attendance.
Despite these achievements in toning down the official Air Force doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), few at RAND were pleased by Wohlstetter's eminence. Bernard Brodie had always resented his influence and was forever plotting to bring him down. Still, Wohlstetter was popular compared to Herman Kahn. All the nuclear strategists were irritated by Kahn who, ultimately, left RAND and created his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, with a million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
RAND chief Frank Collbohm opposed Wohlstetter because his ideas ran counter to those of the Air Force, not to speak of the fact that he had backed John F. Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon for president in 1960 and then compounded his sin by backing Robert McNamara for secretary of defense over the objections of the high command. Worse yet, Wohlstetter had criticized the stultifying environment that had begun to envelop RAND.
In 1963, in a fit of pique and resentment fueled by Bernard Brodie, Collbohm called in Wohlstetter and asked for his resignation. When Wohlstetter refused, Collbohm fired him.
Wohlstetter went on to accept an appointment as a tenured professor of political science at the University of Chicago. From this secure position, he launched vitriolic campaigns against whatever administration was in office "for its obsession with Vietnam at the expense of the current Soviet threat." He, in turn, continued to vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war preparations against the USSR -- from members of the Committee on the Present Danger between 1972 to 1981 to the neoconservatives in the 1990s and 2000s.
Naturally, he supported the creation of "Team B" when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti-Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was "far too forgiving of the Soviet Union." With that in mind, they were authorized to review all the intelligence that lay behind the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet military strength. Actually, Team B and similar right-wing ad hoc policy committees had their evidence exactly backwards: By the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do, expend massive sums on arms; in return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.
Imperial U.
Wohlstetter's activism on behalf of American imperialism and militarism lasted well into the 1990s. According to Abella, the rise to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi -- the Iraqi exile and endless source of false intelligence to the Pentagon -- "in Washington circles came about at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz's office." (In the incestuous world of the neocons, Wolfowitz had been Wohlstetter's student at the University of Chicago.) In short, it is not accidental that the American Enterprise Institute, the current chief institutional manifestation of neoconservative thought in Washington, named its auditorium the "Wohlstetter Conference Center." Albert Wohlstetter's legacy is, to say the least, ambiguous.
Needless to say, there is much more to RAND's work than the strategic thought of Albert Wohlstetter, and Abella's book is an introduction to the broad range of ideas RAND has espoused -- from "rational choice theory" (explaining all human behavior in terms of self-interest) to the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA's Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American imperialism. A full assessment of its influence, both positive and sinister, must await the elimination of the secrecy surrounding its activities and further historical and biographical analysis of the many people who worked there.
The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.
For example, Abella credits RAND with "creating the discipline of terrorist studies," but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that these led to a "constant escalation of the nuclear arms race." By 1967, the U.S. possessed a stockpile of 32,500 atomic and hydrogen bombs.
In Vietnam, RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to military escalation against North Vietnam -- and even after the think tank's strategy had obviously failed and the secretary of defense had disowned it, RAND never publicly acknowledged that it had been wrong. Abella comments, "RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse wielded by its patron, whether it be the Air Force or the Office of the Secretary of Defense." And it has always relied on classifying its research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.
In my opinion, these issues come to a head over one of RAND's most unusual initiatives -- its creation of an in-house, fully accredited graduate school of public policy that offers Ph.D. degrees to American and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute and today known as the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 Ph.D.s in microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors drawn principally from the staffs of RAND's research units, and it has an annual student body of approximately 900. In addition to coursework, qualifying examinations, and a dissertation, PRGS students are required to spend 400 days working on RAND projects. How RAND and the Air Force can classify the research projects of foreign and American interns is unclear; nor does it seem appropriate for an open university to allow dissertation research, which will ultimately be available to the general public, to be done in the hothouse atmosphere of a secret strategic institute.
Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND was Daniel Ellsberg's release to the public of the secret record of lying by every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. However, RAND itself was and remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.
Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr., the chairman of RAND's Economics Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997, "dripped venom when interviewed about the [Ellsberg] incident more than thirty years after the fact." Such behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and care.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Thomas Sugrue: Review of 4 Books on Racism
Source: Nation (4-24-08)
[Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis and, most recently, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality in the North (forthcoming this fall from Random House).]
*Race Relations: A Critique *
by Stephen Steinberg
*Come on People: On the Path From Victims to Victors *
by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint
*Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal*
by Randall Kennedy
*The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse*
by Richard Thompson Ford
"So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds," proclaimed Barack Obama in January from the pulpit at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, in a speech marking the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Obama's high-minded words echo those of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, whose 1944 book An American Dilemma still defines the basic dynamics of racial politics in America. In a lengthy italicized passage in his introduction, Myrdal provided the essence of his argument for readers who did not want to slog through its 1,483 data-laden pages: "The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on." For its unflinching accounts of patterns of segregation, the rhetoric and practice of Jim Crow, and pervasive racial violence, Myrdal's book is indispensable. But the book's longest-lived contribution was its argument--one that resonated with American religious and therapeutic culture--that racial inequality was fundamentally a moral and psychological problem that would be resolved only when Americans' hearts and minds were untainted by prejudice.
Myrdal had many detractors, most of them on the left. Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker criticized him for downplaying the long history of black resistance to inequality. Oliver Cromwell Cox, the West Indian-born sociologist whose brilliant but mostly neglected book Caste, Class, and Race was published just a few years after An American Dilemma, took Myrdal to task for downplaying the connection between race and economic exploitation. Cox singled out Myrdal's "mystical" belief that changing individual attitudes would end the "exploitation" at the heart of racial inequality. "In the end," wrote Cox, "the social system is exculpated." Myrdal's critics grew more numerous in the 1960s. In their 1968 manifesto Black Power, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton offered their own challenge to individualistic understandings of race relations and coined the term "institutional racism" to account for the ways that racial inequality was not solely or even primarily a matter of beliefs or attitudes. They pinpointed "conditions of poverty and discrimination" rooted in unequal relationships of power and privilege, like the healthcare system that failed urban blacks and that "destroyed and maimed" lives every bit as effectively as the actions of the most brutal individual racists.
Aptheker, Cox, Carmichael and Hamilton were swimming against strong political and cultural currents. Most Americans now, as then--black and white, leftist, liberal or conservative--take for granted that racial inequality is predominantly a problem of hearts and minds, of bad attitudes, deeply felt prejudices, irrational thinking, intolerance and immorality. They aren't wholly wrong. Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., overt racism (Klan marches, Denny's restaurants rebuffing black customers and noose-laden trees in Jena, Louisiana) still plagues America. But hooded Klansmen, bigoted waitresses and perverted youth who romanticize lynching (of which there are still all too many) are not the prime causes of racial inequality in America today. Nor are the many whites who still trade in vile stereotypes of blacks.
The obsession with individual culpability has created an impasse in our thinking about race, right down to the widely used misnomers "postracial" and "post-civil rights era." Explaining racial inequality in America--especially the most enduring form of it, that between blacks and whites--flummoxes even those most devoted to analyzing and eradicating it. How do we make sense out of a country where racial inequality is deeply entrenched but where racism is seldom overt? How can we square evidence of racial progress with the grim reality of persistent racialized poverty, unemployment, health and wealth gaps and educational disparities?
There are two prevailing answers to these questions. Racial optimists emphasize the extraordinary progress blacks have made in the United States over the last half-century. In their view, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s--and the related shift in white attitudes--removed the formal legal obstacles to black advancement. As a result of the society-wide delegitimation of racism, most whites are now truly colorblind. The market rewards blacks and whites alike on their merit. Racial separation is the result of the inexorable expression of freedom of choice. Any remaining inequality is the result of blacks' cultural pathologies and moral deficiencies, not racism. Only African-Americans themselves can solve their problems, by dealing with the dysfunctional behaviors and self-defeating attitudes that keep them down.
Racial pessimists, by contrast, argue that racism is pervasive but well hidden. Peel away whites' colorblind rhetoric and beneath it you will find deep-rooted, perhaps subconscious, evidence of racial hatred. When white public officials criticize blacks (think Bill Clinton and Sister Souljah or the recent fracas between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson and civil rights legislation), they face charges of racism. And the horrible and still all-too-frequent acts of racist violence are regularly interpreted as the tip of an iceberg of white hatred. Racially tinged insults or crimes become the moral equivalent of lynchings. Racial justice, in this view, requires constant vigilance against veiled and hooded racism. And it requires an ongoing struggle for hearts and minds--exhortation and education to reveal and overcome hidden biases. Two Harvard psychologists, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, have even gone so far as to devise a cognitive test that correlates rapid flashes of black and white faces and words with positive or negative connotations to uncover "implicit bias" (what a skeptical critic calls measuring "prejudice in milliseconds"). They have recast racism as a problem in the amygdala of the American.
Banaji and Greenwald's work fits within a centurylong tradition of social science research that, as Stephen Steinberg shows in Race Relations: A Critique, has obscured more about racial inequality than it has revealed. Steinberg is a genealogist of mainstream racial sociology--tracing its troubled heritage from Booker T. Washington through the celebrated Chicago School sociologists of the early and mid-twentieth century through Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and, most recently, William Julius Wilson. Specialists won't be wholly satisfied with Steinberg's rather selective intellectual history. Steinberg is, for example, much better at interrogating the work of white sociologists like the University of Chicago's Robert Park than he is in fleshing out the complexities of the many black social scientists--including Cox, E. Franklin Frazier and Charles Johnson--who came out of the Chicago School. But Race Relations is a critical essay--not a comprehensive history. Steinberg is relentlessly polemical, often witty and sometimes brilliant in his debunking of the conventional wisdom. Like all iconoclasts, he overstates his case. But for all of his rhetorical excess, his argument that the mainstream of twentieth-century social science downplayed racial oppression and exploitation for individualistic understandings of race relations is powerful and convincing, and it needs to be heard as he shouts it from the rooftops.
A key villain in Steinberg's story is Robert Park, a white journalist who worked closely with the Tuskegee Institute's Booker T. Washington (ghostwriting at least some of Washington's famed The Story of the Negro, published in 1909) before joining the nation's most illustrious sociology department at the University of Chicago in 1914. Park's fault, according to Steinberg, was his faith in the inevitability of racial progress, his condescension toward black research subjects and his inability to see the connections between black oppression, American imperialism and white economic power. Chicago School sociology, argues Steinberg, bequeathed Myrdal and his successors a paradigm of "race relations" that emphasized attitudes and beliefs and downplayed white power and privilege along with the economic and political institutions that created and reinforced them.
Steinberg's discussion of the period from the 1940s through the '60s is far sketchier and ultimately less compelling than his analysis of Park and Myrdal. He misses two crucial developments in the postwar years that ensured the hegemony of the "race relations" model. The first was the cold war. Anti-Communism shunted critics like Cox to the margins and heightened the clout of Myrdal's popularizers, who celebrated the "American creed" of opportunity and liberty. Those who demonstrated that America had been built on the backs of unfree labor and who argued for the fundamental interconnection between racial and economic inequality were ridiculed as reds. The second was the triumph of social psychology, a field that located the roots of racial inequality in the "authoritarian personality" or in deformed familial relations--and promoted therapeutic solutions that targeted both pathological white racists and their psychically "damaged" black victims.
Steinberg's bête noire--the only black sociologist whose work comes in for detailed analysis--is William Julius Wilson, who succeeded Park at the University of Chicago before taking his current post at Harvard. Wilson became an academic celebrity with the publication of his controversial 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race. He emerged as a leading skeptic of affirmative action, arguing instead for universal programs that would address economic insecurity. (Steinberg quotes a cheeky critic who suggests that the book would have slipped into obscurity had it been titled The Increasing Significance of Class.) Wilson's next influential book, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), resuscitated the controversial 1965 Moynihan Report, which explained marital breakdown as a root cause of African-American poverty. Wilson's critics accused him of legitimating conservative arguments that welfare rewarded unwed motherhood and undermined "family values."
Steinberg comes close to depicting Wilson as a turncoat whose writing gave succor to conservative critics of civil rights. But the lack of nuance in his reading of Wilson weakens Steinberg's overall argument. Wilson's books are something like the Bible, open to multiple, contradictory readings. Right-wing pundits picked up on his bleak depiction of the black family and crusaded against the "perverse incentives of welfare." Neoliberals, most notably Bill Clinton, used Wilson's work to distance themselves from affirmative action. But Steinberg ignores two of Wilson's most important contributions--his emphasis on deindustrialization and its devastating consequences for inner-city residents and, in his 1996 book, When Work Disappears, his discussion of the ways that employers use race as a "signal" of undesirable characteristics, making sweeping generalizations about the unreliability of black workers. That book might have been subtitled The Continuing Significance of Race. Neither argument can be dismissed as cavalierly as Steinberg does.
But if Wilson is too much Steinberg's straw man, Steinberg's larger argument--that racial inequality is ultimately a matter of oppression and exploitation, not personal prejudice and bigotry--stands. The story of inequality is one of the maldistribution of power and resources. Racial inequality has persisted in American life not just because whites harbor bad thoughts about blacks but because the advantages that redound to whites through racial segregation, especially in housing and education, have yet to be dismantled. But structural explanations of racial inequality have never fared well in a culture that attributes success to individual merit and pluck. White Americans who live in privileged suburbs pride themselves on their colorblindness but resist efforts to construct affordable housing lest it interfere with property values. They rebel against the misuse of their tax dollars to support the indolent and efforts to shore up failing urban schools. Structural explanations are taboo because they puncture our treasured myths of upward mobility and self-reinvention. Anyone can make it if they try hard enough, if they break free from the chains of dependency, if they get up in the morning and say, "Yes, I can!"
Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint's Come on People, combining pop psychology and individualist bromides, carries racial individualism to its logical and absurd conclusion. "How many speakers speak out every day about racism, whether it's systemic or whatever?" writes Cosby. "Even if there is truth to what they say, they sedate themselves with it." Come on People is a mishmash of romanticism ("In 1950, we still feared our parents and respected them"), libertarianism ("Governments don't care. People care, and no people care like parents do") and hoary parental advice ("Turn off the TV," "Reinforce Standard English," "Respect Our Elders"). The book is ostensibly targeted toward poor and working-class blacks, but Cosby and Poussaint's real audience is middle-class blacks, those cardigan-wearing suburbanites who have "made it" and who can nod along righteously as they distance themselves from their prodigal drug-dealing sons and nephews and grandchildren who live their lives buying iced-out bling, "wallowing in victimhood" and blaming whites and "the system" rather than shaping up and imitating their betters. Come on People is The Power of Positive Thinking for the wayward Negro. We shall overcome--by ourselves, by our own hard work and gumption, thank you very much.
Cosby and Poussaint's notion that black poverty and violence are the result of self-defeating behavior is simplistic, if widely held among blacks and whites. And their solution--that black people need to fix it themselves by fixing themselves--is disastrously shortsighted. We expect the poor to be heroic and then lambaste them for failing. Cosby and Poussaint give a nod to the difficulties of life for impoverished and working-class blacks who struggle to get by on mediocre wages, in insecure jobs, with less and less support from a punitive welfare state and with notoriously troubled schools. But the duo's solution is part of the problem. Heroic efforts at self-uplift might redeem a handful of lucky people, but it will take more than turning off rap music, giving up expensive sneakers and listening to Grandpa to take on the unfinished business of racial inequality.
Cosby is one of a beleaguered rank of black public figures--others being Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, William Julius Wilson, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson (before he was tried for murder)--who have been branded as race traitors. In his book-length essay Sellout, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy offers a historical typology of Black Judases, Benedict Arnolds, House Negroes and Oreos, among them blacks who helped thwart slave rebellions, black men who have married white women, black conservatives, black critics of affirmative action and blacks who have passed as white. In their ranks is Kennedy himself, whose defense of the "N word" in his 2002 book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and his subsequent testimony about the "chameleon-like nature" of the word as an expert witness in a hate-crime case led Black Commentator editor and columnist Margaret Kimberley to charge that he was "an opportunistic self-hater with all the establishment's top credentials, a very dangerous enemy indeed." No less than the Council of Black Internal Affairs, publisher of the authoritative American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms, charged that the mild-mannered law professor's scholarship was "more harmful than the crimes of common felons."
Kennedy walks a fine line between those who eschew the concept of the sellout as uncivil and those who promiscuously use the term to discredit every slight variation from an imagined racial purity. Kennedy argues that the term "sellout" is a necessary device for the maintenance of a cohesive group identity, and it sometimes furthers the goals of racial justice. Sometimes, blacks need to close ranks to protect their interests. Among those Kennedy identifies as justifiably ostracized are William Hannibal Thomas, Otterbein College's first black student and author of The American Negro, What He Was, What He Is and What He Will Become, a 1901 book beloved by white supremacists for its argument that blacks were "an illiterate race, in which ignorance, cowardice, folly, and idleness are rife." Kennedy provocatively contends that the Montgomery bus boycott succeeded because blacks who were indifferent to the protests walked to work or joined carpools for fear of being denounced as sellouts. Kennedy even exculpates Clarence Thomas, "a charter member of the 'Sell Out Hall of Shame.'" Kennedy argues that Thomas's jurisprudence is misguided, his aversion to civil rights troubling and his rejection of the affirmative action programs that benefited him in college and law school hypocritical. Nonetheless, Kennedy sees Thomas as a genuine "race man," committed in his own misguided way to bettering his people. Kennedy argues that even Thomas's staunchest critics, such as the late federal judge A. Leon Higginbotham and UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, presented no evidence of "intentional misconduct on Thomas's part." No intention, no guilt. Thomas remains inside the circle of blackness.
Kennedy's exceedingly generous and controversial treatment of Thomas is indicative of the fundamental problem with his attempt to redeem the term "sellout." The problems facing black America will not be solved by drawing a tighter circle around "true" black people with "true" black beliefs or widening the circle of "us" to include the likes of Thomas. Intentions should matter far less than results. Reinforcing racial essentialism--which is what the concept of the sellout essentially does--or wasting time reading the minds of alleged race traitors and backsliders does not undermine racial oppression. Clarence Thomas is no more or less a sellout of black interests than fellow Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito or John Roberts. There may be some psychic relief in naming Uncle Toms, but it is a political dead end to quibble over authenticity rather than to challenge bad ideas and public policies with damaging results, regardless of who champions them and the nature of their motives.
In The Race Card, Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, grapples with our myopic focus on individual racist thoughts and actions rather than persistent structural inequality. Ford chronicles our impoverished racial discourse, in which "cheap theatricality stands in for valuable insight" and "simplistic dogma masquerades as analysis." Though he doesn't use the term, Ford describes a sort of false consciousness wherein personal slights, interpersonal disputes and legitimate differences of opinion are elevated to the status of racism.
Ford plucks his examples from the garish world of celebrity culture: O.J. Simpson's attorneys painting him as a victim of a racist conspiracy; Oprah Winfrey turning a rude encounter with snobby French salesclerks at an Hermès shop in Paris into a cause célèbre; and rapper Jay-Z's boycott of Cristal Champagne because its corporate flack dissed "'hip hop' culture." There is more than a little sensationalistic fluff padding Ford's accounts of spurious charges of racism (do we really need another rehash of "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit"?). But when he gets into real-life examples, such as taxi drivers refusing to pick up black passengers (it's the logical consequence of persistent residential segregation, concentrated poverty and crime, not usually the bad intentions of cabdrivers), and the disparate racial impact of Hurricane Katrina (the real villain here is not George Bush but instead systematic racial segregation, the marginalization of the black poor and long-term disinvestment), his insights are bracing. Ford also challenges the slippery ways that aggrieved individuals (including the obese, people with tattoos and piercings, and white critics of affirmative action) have created a politics and jurisprudence of prejudice analogous to racism. "Fat is not the new black," Ford argues, dismantling arguments that when airlines require overweight passengers to pay for two seats or gymnasiums decline to hire a person of size to run an exercise class, it is the equivalent of systematic Jim Crow. "Weightism and looksism aren't problems of social order or of social injustice," as were laws that excluded blacks as a group from the full prerogatives of citizenship.
Ford's critique of the race card is rooted in a larger, institutional understanding of racial discrimination. "Our tools for describing, analyzing, and righting racial injustice assume that racial injustices are the work of racists," he writes. Such tools create confusion when applied to what Ford provocatively calls "racism without racists," which is what occurs when people get trapped in the legacies of discriminatory policies. The result is disabling. The scandal-hungry media feast on ridiculous or exaggerated charges of racism while ignoring the real problems of racial inequality in their midst. Whenever the race card gets played, by either a multiculturalist or an opponent of affirmative action, it trivializes racial inequality and oppression and harms the cause of civil rights: "Practices that create a permanent underclass," he writes, "are unjust in a different and more profound way" than isolated, arbitrary acts of prejudice. Fingering a few bigots--
rightly or wrongly--does nothing to challenge pervasive educational and housing segregation, the black-white wealth and health gaps, or the disproportionate impact of the prison-industrial complex on young black men.
If there is one lesson to be learned from the past half-century of struggle for racial equality, it is that accusing elite blacks of selling out, calling on poor blacks to shape up or ship out and making a high-minded effort to change the hearts and minds of white Americans have not fundamentally reshuffled the deck of racial inequality in America, especially when black interests threaten white power and privilege. Change did not come only because of high-minded rhetoric or hope. It took the coercive power of the federal government and courts to desegregate schools. The opening of the American workplace did not happen because the shingles fell from the eyes of racist employers. It took grassroots activism and the threat of disruption, along with litigation and the power of regulation, to break down Jim Crow on the factory floor and in the corporate office.
The struggle for racial equality and its partial and incomplete victories are forgotten in our confused time. The politics of race in 2008 is, more than ever, a politics of national redemption through personal transformation. It is all strangely removed from the experience of most black and white Americans. Despite more than a half-century of progress on racial matters, rates of black-white segregation remain incredibly high; neighborhoods and public schools in the North and South remain separate and unequal (and, despite our myths of progress, they are resegregating); and blacks fare worse than whites on nearly every measure of health, well-being and success. Nearly half of African-American children live in poverty, and there are more black men in prison than in college. Black households have on average only 10 percent of the wealth of white households. The current housing crisis affects all Americans, but blacks are disproportionately represented in the ranks of those with subprime loans and foreclosed properties. All of these amount to a crisis--but one that is almost wholly absent from the political agenda. So long as the battle for racial justice continues to be fought on the battleground of hearts and minds, so long as it misinterprets the gauzy politics of symbolism and rhetoric as victory, and so long as it holds out the misguided hope that ferreting out the last hard-core racists or sellouts will transform American life, then the day when "we shall overcome" will remain a distant dream.
Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Roger Pulvers: Review of Kokichi Nishimura's The Bone Man of Kokoda
Source: Japan Times (4-20-08)
Is there anything grand that can be salvaged from the murdering and brutal maiming — both physical and psychological — of millions of people?
Yes, there may sometimes be a right side and a wrong side, although in virtually every war the lines of guilt are so crisscrossed as to be indistinguishable. One's own side's causes are revered; those of the other side are vilified forever in the historical record of "good" (normally "winning") nations.
Yet, in fact, all people caught up in the violence of war, from uniformed combatants to resistance fighters and refugees, are victims. The hostilities may end, but the ugly brute that is their creation continues to live on and thrive in the minds of survivors.
For those who are forced to live with this brute, the aftermath of a war is merely its continuation under different circumstances.
If you wish to see a clear illustration of this, read the new book "The Bone Man of Kokoda" (Pan Macmillan, Australia). Here, Australian author and journalist Charles Happell has taken the story of Japanese World War II veteran Kokichi Nishimura and turned it into a parable of will and unquenchable guilt.
Nishimura's story would never have been told had he done his duty as a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army and destroyed all his papers, records and diaries when the war ended. Japan then was intent — as it still is, by and large — on obliterating the misdeeds of the past. Consequently, to some in this country the past has ceased to exist, save as a jumble of symbols to decorate a tawdry nostalgia.
But not to Kokichi Nishimura. He saw it as his duty not to forget, and to not allow his compatriots to forget, what he had witnessed.
Nishimura was part of the Nankai Shitai (South Seas Detachment), the infantry brigade that took Guam and sent troops to secure New Guinea in the summer of 1942. The plan — and a foolhardy one it was, given the terrain and climate — was to cross Papua over the Owen Stanley Range from Kokoda, then to continue on and take the capital, Port Moresby.
Every horror is here
The battles along what is now known as the Kokoda Track have been written about extensively in Australia and elsewhere. But here is the story from the other, losing side — a story of monumental hardship, disease, wounding, death, cannibalism: Every horror is here, relayed without a shred of glory.
Nishimura was one of 56 natives of Kochi Prefecture in the southern island of Shikoku who took part in the campaign. In the first 15 days of battle on the Kokoda Track, 55 of them were killed. The fact that Nishimura was the sole survivor from among his Kochi compatriots would come back to him again and again during and after the war.
As if this experience weren't enough, Nishimura saw action in Burma (now known as Myanmar) and on the high seas. It is a miracle that he survived to tell the tale. As for Maj. Gen. Tomitara Horii's South Seas Detachment, the 3-week-long trek on the Kokoda Track not only ended in defeat and retreat, but also in the loss of nearly half of its more than 10,000 soldiers. All in all, 13,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in eastern New Guinea in roughly the last six months of 1942.
Marching for up to 14 hours a day on 300 grams (and, later in 1942, 50 grams) of rice, with only minimal medicines and paltry intelligence as to where or how strong the enemy were — such has been the nightmare existence of millions of soldiers through the ages. When called to arms, Nishimura weighed 73 kg. When finally evacuated out of New Guinea in June 1943, he weighed 28 kg — about average for a 9-year-old.
But what makes Nishimura's case so remarkable is not the hardships he experienced during the war, but the vow he made to himself afterward — to repatriate the bones of as many of his fallen comrades as possible.
The story of "The Bone Man of Kokoda" really begins the day the war ended: Aug. 15, 1945. Though he married that year, Nishimura spent the next 10 years wandering around Shikoku doing jobs such as digging wells and logging. He did return home on occasion, enough to father three children. But his heart was elsewhere. Nishimura had been a bright and budding engineer before the war, and afterward, eventually, he founded the Nishimura Machinery Research Institute in Tokyo and turned it into a highly profitable enterprise, contracting work with major companies, Sony among them.
But in 1979, Nishimura made a fateful decision, keeping the vow he made to himself. He left his wife and family, turning over all property and assets to them. He would meet with his daughter over the ensuing years, but he never saw his wife or sons again.
Counterproductive to relations
For an incredible 25 years, he lived by himself in tents or makeshift huts along or near the Kokoda Track, searching for the remains of his comrades. He managed also to build schools and workshops to educate and train local people.
Finding remains along the Kokoda Track proved difficult; but eventually Nishimura was to unearth more than 100 bodies — or parts of bodies — at Giruwa, where Japanese forces had been decimated, and some 60 at Buna and Gona.
By the 1990s, the governments of New Guinea and Japan had begun to view his one-man mission as counterproductive to relations between the two countries. Nonetheless, Nishimura persisted, carrying bones and ashes back to Japan and relentlessly searching for the next of kin of the deceased. Anything that had belonged to his comrades was treasured: rusty buckles, spoons, mess tins.
Is "The Bone Man of Kokoda" the chronicle of a man deluded by the fanatic oaths of a long-gone era, when tens of millions of Japanese men and women were inculcated into glorious death-worship? Is Nishimura a hero who refuses to forget the ultimate sacrifices made by his fellow warriors; or is he a foolhardy relic himself, a man whose mission only perpetrates the very cult of death that marks his generation?
Whatever one's interpretation of his lifelong mission may be, it is certain that the perpetrators of the crimes of war — be they a Tojo, a Hitler, a Bush or a Blair — have no right to bluster glory in the face of such all-consuming misery.
No matter how many years pass after a war, we are all caught up, one way or another, in the grief that reaches far beyond the deaths of those who fought it.
The soul of Kokichi Nishimura may be troubled; it may be obsessed. But it is not disfigured like the souls of those "masters of war" who force conflict on the world and, to assuage their personal guilt, seek pomp through the pain of millions of soldiers and their families.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
John McAdams: Review of David Kaiser's The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
Source: WashingtonDecoded (website run by Max Holland) (3-11-08)
[John McAdams is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University and webmaster of the Kennedy Assassination Home Page. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1981.]
David Kaiser: Response to Max Holland
& John McAdams
At first glance, David Kaiser’s book promises to be one of the more sensible volumes on the JFK assassination. Published by an esteemed press, it is written by a reputable, experienced historian. Kaiser, moreover, is one of the first from his profession to plumb the voluminous collection of once-secret documents assiduously collected, at some cost to the US taxpayer, by the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.
In several respects, Kaiser does not disappoint. He cheerfully concedes that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president in Dealey Plaza, and accepts the single bullet explanation.[1] He supplies a solid account of Kennedy-era assassination plots against Fidel Castro (which originated under President Eisenhower), and he provides a workmanlike narrative of the Kennedy administration’s campaign against organized crime. Unlike so many authors writing about the assassination, Kaiser is not in Camelot’s thrall, and he does not whitewash any of the questionable actions of the Kennedy brothers.[2] Among other things, he describes the tactics of the Senate “Rackets” Committee, of which Robert Kennedy was the top staffer, as “reminiscent of” those used by the far more notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as Joe McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee on investigations.[3]
But not far into the book, Kaiser’s judgment deserts him. He tries to make the case that the Kennedys’ anti-Castro plots and crusade against organized crime climaxed in the president’s assassination, and he hammers the facts until they fit this thesis. The result is a clanking, Rube Goldberg-style conspiracy contraption that falls of its own weight. Far from uncovering an “appalling and grisly conspiracy,” as the book’s catalog copy asserts, Kaiser merely recycles hoary claims that have been debunked for decades, while putting back into circulation innuendo and unproven allegations. Kaiser ignores very stubborn facts whenever they are inconvenient to his smoke-and-mirrors history.
Links Where There Are None
Kaiser has a penchant–one fatal to serious history–for the most unreliable evidence and the most implausible scenarios.
Take, for example, his attempt to link Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, to the Mafia in a way that might implicate Ruby in a conspiracy to kill JFK. Kaiser claims that in 1959, Ruby visited Santo Trafficante in Trescornia prison in Cuba not long after Castro’s overthrow of the Batista dictatorship. If true, the encounter would seem to be highly significant, because it would tie Ruby to a high-level mobster soon to be involved in the CIA’s efforts to eliminate Castro.
Kaiser correctly cites John Wilson-Hudson, a British journalist, as the source for this claim. But Wilson-Hudson could hardly be more unreliable as a source, and he is also the sole source for the alleged visit. Years before the assassination, one CIA document from 1959 labeled Wilson-Hudson as being “mentally unbalanced.”[4] Another document, from 1963, reported that “altho[ugh] Wilson [is] intelligent, erratic behavior indicates mental unbalance”; in addition, he was deemed “violently anti-US.”[5] Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was all but determined to pin the assassination on the Mafia regardless of the evidence, treated Wilson-Hudson’s claim gingerly. HSCA’s final report refused to embrace Wilson-Hudson’s allegation, most likely because a committee staffer reviewed the journalist’s CIA file, which included other evaluations such as “believe on first returns from FBI check he [is] likely [to] be [a] psychopath.”[6]
Yet for Kaiser, none of these red flags matter sufficiently. Wilson-Hudson’s story is too pivotal to the conspiracy Kaiser is determined to construct, no matter how flimsy the foundation.
Another key piece of evidence Kaiser presents to implicate Ruby involves long-distance phone calls Ruby made to various mob-upped people around the country in the days immediately prior to the assassination. Ruby’s contemporaneous explanation was that he was having trouble with the strippers’ union, the mob-connected American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA). The Warren Commission left it at that, but in the late 1970s, HSCA reopened the matter and it analyzed these calls in detail. Its investigators found that most of them could easily be accounted for by Ruby’s problems with the AGVA, although HSCA did leave the door open for some of the calls having been suspicious.[7] Subsequently, author Gerald Posner investigated three calls that HSCA thought might be worrisome, but he only found that they, too, were related to Ruby’s labor troubles.[8]
None of this bothers Kaiser, who prefers innuendo.[9] He somehow fails to notice that there were too many calls for them to be conspiratorial. Are we supposed to believe that six or eight hoodlums, from all over the country, were being directed to catch a plane to Dallas and show up in time to help cover-up the killing of Kennedy? Of course, Kaiser might say that only one or two of the calls were conspiratorial. Even so, he has to admit that a large number were exactly what Ruby and the people who received them said they were: appeals for help in dealing with the AVGA. And if most of the calls were, it’s perfectly plausible that all of them were.
Stick Figures
The issue of the telephone calls also highlights one element that is particularly striking in Kaiser’s book: the complete superficiality of the characters in it. Kaiser simply doesn’t know, understand, or convey a realistic sense of the people he is writing about. To a man (and woman), they are cardboard-character figures, movable at will and whim for the purpose of concocting a conspiracy. Kaiser plays to every exhausted stereotype of the “mobster,” “spook,” or “right-winger.”
When the House Select Committee analyzed the long-distance calls, it found that Ruby had been calling people he hardly knew, often after not having been in contact for years. What was telling, and poignant, was that Ruby utterly failed to muster any support. None of the people he talked to was willing to lift a finger, and others simply failed to return his call. If Kaiser understood Ruby, he would realize the salient point here is that no one responded to Ruby’s pleas. Far from being a well-connected mobster, he was a poor schlub and wannabe who couldn’t bring a smidgen of influence to bear on a mob-dominated union. Not having trouble with mob-connected unions . . . isn’t that one of the perks of being an important mobster?
Kaiser’s defective understanding of Ruby becomes even more apparent when he has Ruby stalking Oswald in the hours following the assassination. In real life, Ruby was an opportunistic vigilante, but in Kaiser-land, the clear implication is that Ruby was a single-minded mob assassin, waiting for the right moment to silence the “patsy.” Ruby’s fumbling and bungling of that supposed task, not to mention his own sworn statements, prove that Kaiser’s scenario does not ring true. If Ruby really had such a critical assignment, he should have shot Oswald Friday night, when the chaotic scene at the Dallas police headquarters allowed Ruby, a compulsive gate-crasher, to gain easy entry. Surely it was vital to the conspirators to silence Oswald, the mob’s fall guy, at the earliest possible opportunity. Instead of attending to serious business, Ruby gloried at being where the action was. He ran around claiming to be a translator for the Israeli press, shrewdly handed out his Carousel Club business card to out-of-town reporters, and he thoughtfully delivered sandwiches to the hard-working staff of KLIF radio.[10]
By the same token, Ruby was nonchalantly engaged in wiring money to one of his strippers on Sunday morning at the very time when Oswald was going to be transferred to the custody of the Dallas County sheriff at a moment’s notice. Ruby barely sneaked into the police garage in time.
Some hitman.[11]
Tossing in Conspiracy Factoids
In keeping with the cast of his narrative, Kaiser repeatedly throws all manner of conspiracy “buff” lore into his account. It lends the book an appropriate ambiance.
Kaiser asserts, for example, that Oswald “did have contacts with both the FBI and the CIA in the months after his return from the Soviet Union–directly with the FBI, and indirectly with the CIA through the enigmatic George De Mohrenschildt . . . .”[12] Kaiser then goes on to quote De Mohrenschildt as telling the Warren Commission that a “G. Walter Moore” had talked with him about Oswald.[13] “G. Walter Moore” was actually J. Walton Moore, who headed the Dallas office of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service, as it was known in 1963. Much later, in 1977, De Mohrenschildt told author Edward J. Epstein a more embellished version of the same story: that an associate of Moore had actually “tasked” him with meeting Oswald.[14] That would suggest a much more active posture by the CIA toward Oswald.
Yet Kaiser should know better than to use any late-1970s testimony of De Mohrenschildt, because by then, he was certifiably committable. Suicidal, De Mohrenschildt would rave about how the “Jewish Mafia” and FBI were out to get him, and in 1976, he was actually confined in a Texas mental hospital for three months.[15] The weight of the evidence is also overwhelming that De Mohrenschildt was never tasked to meet Oswald. He encountered Oswald only during that brief period when the Oswalds were minor celebrities in Dallas’s White Russian community.
Kaiser knows that CIA files show no effort to keep tabs on or debrief Oswald, for he admits that “no 1962-63 contact between De Mohrenschildt and [J. Walton] Moore has ever come to light.” Nonetheless, Kaiser dismisses the lack of a paper trail, arguing that “Moore was apparently using standard CIA practice: anything not actually documented in the files could safely be denied.”[16] In other words, J. Walton Moore was doing the lying here, according to Kaiser, rather than De Mohrenschildt, although only the latter had a proven record of unreliability.
As is typical with conspiracy authors, Kaiser never bothers to ask why Moore would lie about this. For more than a generation, conspiracists have claimed it is highly suspicious that the CIA did not debrief Oswald on his return from the USSR. But if keeping tabs on a former defector was obviously something that needed to be done and routine, why wouldn’t Moore do it, and cheerfully document having done it?
Oswald
As Norman Mailer once wrote so memorably,
. . . Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. At the least, we can be certain he was spying on the world in order to report to himself. For, by his own measure, he [was] one of the principalities of the universe.[17]
Yet, in David Kaiser’s hands, Oswald has no will of his own. He is an empty vessel, waiting to be infused with motives and actions that Kaiser wants to impute to him.
Kaiser believes, incredibly, that Oswald was not a leftist at all, but worked for the FBI in an attempt to “infiltrate” communist organizations “following in the footsteps of Herbert Philbrick.”[18] As proof that Oswald’s extensively documented connections to leftist organizations could not have been the result of genuine conviction, Kaiser asserts that Oswald “certainly could have been under no illusions as to the stature of the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1962.”[19] In other words, Kaiser posits that Oswald recognized that communism in America was an exhausted political movement.
But was that truly Oswald’s worldview? Anyone knowledgeable about Oswald’s biography would agree that he was more than capable of spinning political fantasies.[20] Indeed, after his political awakening in the 1950s, during the Rosenbergs’ trial, Oswald’s life might be labeled an unending serial of political fantasies, all of which sprang from his cockeyed and vulgar understanding of the world around him.
Kaiser observes that Oswald was “trying to create a paper trail tying himself to the Communist Party USA and to the SWP [Socialist Workers’ Party]. His simultaneous courtship of both organizations – which he must have known were bitter enemies – is rather suspicious.”[21] This will not ring true to anyone familiar with Oswald, who was an ideological naif, not some Jewish kid who grew up in the Bronx and attended the City College of New York in the 1930s, where he might have been tutored in the fine points of Marxist dialectics over lunchtime. Oswald was poorly educated, and what little education he had was in Southern schools where Marxism was not taught in any detail. He didn’t interact with other Marxists or radicals.
Once, in August of 1963, he received a perfunctory letter from Arnold Johnson, the director of information for the American Communist Party. In a subsequent argument with his wife Marina about his political activism, Lee read aloud the letter saying “See this? . . . There are people who understand me and think I’m doing useful work. If he respects what I’m doing, then it’s important. He’s the Lenin of our country.”[22] That communism, a powerful force in US intellectual and literary circles during the 1930s, was an all but spent political force by the 1960s, was something Oswald simply didn’t want to comprehend.
The naïve and idiosyncratic nature of Oswald’s ideological commitments is further evidence of their sincerity. Had some intelligence agency enrolled him in the “How to Look Like a Leftist” bootcamp, it’s unlikely he would acted as if he were oblivious to the hatred between Stalinists and Trotskyites, or have written something like “The Atheian System,” with its callow utopianism that bears only an idiosyncratic resemblance to standard Marxist doctrine.[23]
Why the FBI would need Oswald to infiltrate communist organizations—and do so merely by having Oswald write letters sucking up to officials a thousand miles away in New York—is a mystery that Kaiser cannot resolve for one reason: it did not happen. Kaiser admits these organizations were honeycombed with FBI informants who actually attended meetings. At one point, Kaiser claims that Oswald’s “activities fit into a well-documented, broader effort by the FBI and independent right-wing groups to discredit left-wing organizations in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the South.”[24] But unless Oswald was already slated to kill Kennedy, an exchange of letters between these organizations and an oddball in Dallas and New Orleans would not even register as blip on anyone’s radar.
Kaiser has the same logical problem with respect to the radio debate on WDSU in New Orleans in August, 1963. He believes the whole thing was set up–with the witting cooperation of Oswald–to discredit and embarrass the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). But in the New Orleans radio market, there was scarcely any need to discredit an organization with a total membership of one, namely Oswald himself. Claiming that this was a plot to embarrass the FPCC nationally requires some evidence that the plotters knew that Oswald would soon shoot John F. Kennedy, and become infamous as the president’s assassin.
The notion that Oswald was really a rightist is perhaps the most bizarre element in the entire book. For this to be true, Oswald had to have been engaged in a brilliant imposture that involved all of his writings, his public activities and statements, his conversations with White Russians, his conversations with Marina, down to his having a picture of Fidel Castro hanging in his apartment (not to mention that he read The Nation and Corliss Lamont’s writings on Cuba)![25]
But if he was somehow recruited to play a leftist radical, as Kaiser postulates, at what point was he recruited? Even before he left home to join the Marines, Oswald was expressing communist political opinions to his friends. He told Palmer McBride, a fellow employee at the Pfisterer Dental Laboratory in late 1957 or early 1958 that (in McBride’s words),
. . . President Eisenhower was exploiting the working people. [Oswald] then made a statement to the effect that he would like to kill President Eisenhower because he was exploiting the working class. This statement was not made in jest . . . . Lee Oswald was very serious about the virtues of Communism, and discussed those virtues at every opportunity. He would say that the capitalists were exploiting the working class and his central theme seemed to be that the workers in the world would one day rise up and throw off their chains.[26]
In the same vein, William E. Wulf, who went to high school with Oswald, testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald on one occasion,
. . . started expounding the Communist doctrine and saying that he was highly interested in communism, that communism was the only way of life for the worker, et cetera, and then came out with a statement that he was looking for a Communist cell in town to join but he couldn’t find any. He was a little dismayed at this, and he said that he couldn’t find any that would show any interest in him as a Communist, and subsequently, after this conversation, my father came in and we were kind of arguing back and forth about the situation, and my father came in the room, heard what we were arguing on communism, and that this boy was loud-mouthed, boisterous, and my father asked him to leave the house and politely put him out of the house, and that is the last I have seen or spoken with Oswald.[27]
In addition, of course, there is Oswald’s famous 1956 letter to the Socialist Party of America, written three weeks before he turned 17 and joined the Marines, in which he asserted that “I am a Marxist, and have been studying socialist principles for well over fifteen months.”[28] Are we really supposed to believe that Oswald was recruited as a teenager by some intelligence agency, and tasked with conducting an elaborate charade for purposes that were undefined and unimagined at the time?
Kaiser’s portrayal of Oswald as something other than a self-styled leftist leads the author to make bizarre statements about some of Oswald’s activities. Kaiser writes, for example, that “Why Oswald decided to go after [Edwin] Walker is not entirely clear.”[29] Yet given Oswald’s statements to his wife Marina and to George De Mohrenschildt, it’s patently obvious why Oswald targeted a man he considered an up-and-coming American fascist. Kaiser doesn’t seriously deny that Oswald shot at Walker, although he throws out yet another red herring by suggesting that Oswald might have had an accomplice.
To believe Kaiser one has to believe that all of Oswald’s leftist activity was an elaborate pose, and/or an “infiltration” attempt directed toward the left. The accurate explanation is that Oswald was what he really appeared to be—a self-styled leftist and party of one, because no organization on the left was willing to embrace him.
Oswald and the Conspiracy in New Orleans
Misrepresenting Oswald’s politics is only half of Kaiser’s game; making Oswald fit some ill-defined conspiracy is the other necessary component. Kaiser is just as tendentious here as he is with respect to Jack Ruby.
À la New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, Kaiser tries to link Oswald to David Ferrie in New Orleans, initially via their mutual participation in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) while Oswald was still in high school. Kaiser notes that the HSCA turned up five witnesses who confirmed that Oswald was in Ferrie’s unit.[30] What Kaiser fails to mention is that the HSCA witnesses also made it clear that Oswald was not any sort of gung-ho cadet (attending only a few meetings), and he didn’t have any sort of special relationship with Ferrie. Yet Kaiser makes a point of asserting that Ferrie lied when he claimed not to know Oswald when questioned a few days after the assassination. But not recalling one cadet who was briefly in his unit 8 years earlier seems plausible enough. Not yet done, Kaiser points to the somewhat famous photo of Ferrie and Oswald together at a CAP picnic as evidence they knew each other. But the two are standing at opposite sides of a small crowd, and it’s hardly clear that Ferrie would have personally interacted with Oswald at that picnic, and if he did, hardly obvious that he would remember it.
For Kaiser, of course, Ferrie represents a twofer, since he had “connections” (again, that indispensable word) to both anti-Castro Cubans and to local mobster Carlos Marcello. Kaiser appears not to know that Ferrie’s connections with the anti-Castro movement had been severed well before the summer of 1963. A homosexual with a penchant for young boys, Ferrie’s lifestyle was not particularly appreciated by the Catholic (sometimes devoutly Catholic) Cuban exiles. Kaiser treats Ferrie’s “connection” to the exile community as still active during the summer of 1963.[31] As for Marcello, because Ferrie did investigative work for this hoodlum, in Kaiser’s world that is sufficient, in and of itself, to establish a sinister link to the assassination. By this logic, Marcello’s barber was equally “connected” to the conspiracy to kill the president. In any case, Kaiser doesn’t actually bother to link Oswald with Ferrie in 1963—nor can he, although that would seem to be instrumental to his argument.
What’s amazing about Kaiser’s scholarship here is that while he clearly recognizes that Garrison’s 1967-69 probe was a sham, he doesn’t desist from marshaling some of Garrison’s material. Kaiser implies, using logic that can only be called McCarthyite, that it’s very significant that Oswald’s employer in New Orleans, a businessman named William Reily, was a prominent anti-Communist and supporter of the Information Council of the Americas, a local anti-Communist propaganda organization. In reality, working for a conservative anti-communist running a business in New Orleans in 1963 was about as odd as finding a leftist in the English department of any given university today—unavoidable, in other words. Kaiser finds meaning in Oswald’s brief employment at Reily’s coffee packing plant, notwithstanding that there is no evidence Reily ever knew Oswald. He was a low-level employee, frequently missing from his post because he preferred to hang out at a parking garage next door, where he would sit and talk to a gun buff named Adrian Alba.
In one of the book’s more regrettable sections, Kaiser gets suckered into part of Jim Garrison’s deplorable case against Clay Shaw. The so-called “Clinton scenario” involved testimony by several individuals from Clinton, Louisiana, who claimed that Oswald, allegedly in the company of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, was sighted in their town in late August/early September 1963. While there, Oswald reportedly visited a barber shop in nearby Jackson, inquired about a job at the local mental institution, and got into a voter registration line in Clinton before departing.[32] Kaiser is impressed with these Clinton eyewitnesses, and their testimony at Shaw’s 1969 trial was consistent and coherent—indeed, suspiciously so.[33] The earliest statements made in 1967 by the most important of these witnesses are altogether different. Kaiser apparently is unaware of that, and he is also oblivious to the old news that the Clinton story has been discredited. He persists in using it despite acknowledging elsewhere that Garrison had a habit of fabricating “fantastic” accusations.[34]
In New Orleans, where Oswald resided for five months during 1963, Kaiser also tries to couple Oswald to the mob via his relationship with an uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret. Murret was a bookmaker and he apparently had real Mafia connections. Kaiser, in an evidence-free piece of speculation, says that “Certainly it would have been easy enough for Murret to have passed it through the grapevine that his somewhat notorious nephew, the ex-Marine who had defected to Russia and returned with a Russian wife, was back in town.”[35] It certainly would have been easy, but the point is, did Murret ever do anything of the kind?
Kaiser’s cardboard-character approach to his historical subjects is on full display here. In reality, Murret held a very negative view of his nephew. He was put off by Oswald’s failure to hold down a job to support his family (one child already, with another on the way), and that he was failing to teach English to his daughter June (preferring Russian). When Murret heard Oswald debate on behalf of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee on WDSU radio, with Lee defending the organization, he was not at all pleased.[36]
Presumably, Kaiser believes Murret’s sworn testimony before the Warren Commission was a pack of lies, and that Murret happily volunteered up his nephew to kill President Kennedy. But Kaiser does not provide a scintilla of proof.
The Odio Episode
By now it should be manifest that while Kaiser claims to be the first historian to mine the assassination-related documents opened in the 1990s, most of his book consists of material recycled from 44 years of conspiracy books, despite source notes which overwhelmingly list archival documents. This is nowhere more true than in his account of the Odio incident, which is quite similar to the treatment this subject received in a deservedly obscure book entitled Oswald Talked, written by Ray and Mary La Fontaine.[37]
Sylvia Odio, a young Cuban exile living in Dallas, testified that three men came to her door one evening in late September 1963, soliciting funds for their anti-Castro activities. (And indeed, three men did). After the assassination, she was convinced that one of them was Lee Harvey Oswald. If it was Oswald, the encounter would tie him to anti-Castro activists, which for Kaiser constitutes proof that Oswald was involved in a conspiracy. The alleged Odio episode opens the book, later takes up an entire chapter, and is singled out by Kaiser as being the most important evidence of a conspiracy save for Ruby’s murder of Oswald.[38]
Kaiser insists that investigators for both the Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations found Odio “highly credible.”[39] This is an oversimplification, since the Warren Commission didn’t believe she had really seen Oswald, and HSCA had a statement from her psychiatrist saying,
Let me say, consciously, I don’t think she would want to lie, but to me, it’s very conceivable that in the histrionic personality, the kind of personality that she had that where she would not lie, she could be–has a degree of suggestibility that she could believe something that did not really transpire.[40]
There is no reason in the world to think that Odio consciously lied about Oswald’s presence. But as Kaiser ought to know, there were scores of false “Oswald sightings” in the wake of the assassination. Well-meaning citizens earnestly swore, for example, that they had seen Oswald bring a rifle into an Irving, Texas sporting goods store so that a telescopic sight could be mounted on it.[41] (In fact, Oswald had purchased the rifle with the sight already installed). In Alice, Texas a total of 17 eyewitnesses came forward to report a fellow they were positive was Oswald had showed up in various locations prior to the assassination, sometimes with Marina in tow. (In fact, it could not possibly have been Oswald).[42] Each and every lead that came flooding into the FBI after the assassination was dutifully tracked by the bureau’s field office in Dallas and dozens of other cities across the nation. The vast majority did not pan out, and only a handful were dealt with by the Warren Commission.
Could the Odio affair, like all the other eyewitness sightings, including those in Clinton, be just another mistake? That possibility is plausible enough, and becomes more plausible if one looks carefully at the circumstances. There is no evidence that corroborates Sylvia Odio’s conviction that she saw Oswald.[43]
The Warren Commission determined that if Oswald visited Odio in Dallas, it almost certainly had to be on the evening of September 25. Oswald apparently got an employment check at a New Orleans post office on the morning of that day, and cashed it at a Winn-Dixie store by 1:00 PM.[44] (Kaiser posits that perhaps the check arrived a day earlier, or perhaps somebody else cashed it, but there is absolutely no evidence for that). After leaving New Orleans, Oswald either went to Dallas or Houston. But Kaiser ignores good evidence that Oswald called the Houston home of Horace Twiford, an official in the Texas Socialist Labor Party, on September 25.[45] In addition, how could Oswald be aboard a bus that left Houston at 2:35 AM, bound for Laredo, if he had been in Dallas that same evening?[46]
Not easily deterred, Kaiser is so intent on putting Oswald in Sylvia Odio’s presence that he even attempts to shift their alleged encounter to October 3, after Oswald got back from Mexico City. Although Kaiser acknowledges that Odio moved around this time, he is apparently unaware Odio occupied her new residence no later than October 1. Given that it was such an unforgettable encounter, it strains credulity to believe that Odio did not manage to remember accurately where the alleged meeting took place when she told the FBI and Warren Commission about it. (Indeed, packing boxes filled the living room on the day the three men made their visit, Odio recalled).[47] But to make the facts fit his preferred thesis, Kaiser modestly suggests that he has noticed “what everyone has missed.” Odio “could have been mistaken.”[48]
Apart from everything else, the mere fact that Kaiser devotes so many words to the alleged Oswald-Odio encounter is a telling indicator of just how bent his whole approach to this subject truly is. By comparison, Oswald’s proven attempt to assassinate General Edwin Walker in April 1963 is given short shrift, even though nothing is more revealing of Oswald’s willingness to commit political murder than the Walker episode.
A Generic Conspiracy Book
One could go on ad nauseam about the mistakes in interpretation, outright errors, fallacies, and gaps in logic or fact which appear on virtually every page of The Road to Dallas. Such a list would be tedious to compile and boring to read, relieved only on occasion by a few outright howlers. Kaiser lends credence, for example, to Jim Garrison’s notion that Melba Marcades, aka Rose Cheramie [sic], a prostitute and heroin addict with 51 arrests on her rap sheet, was beaten and thrown from a moving car after she acquired “foreknowledge” of the assassination from two dark-complected men.[49] (For readers not steeped in buff lore, Marcades’s undignified exit from a car was the opening scene in Oliver Stone’s film, JFK). This episode has been debunked repeatedly.[50]
Kaiser, for all his credentials, has produced a typical conspiracy book, indistinguishable from 300-400 others that are floating around out there. The inevitable failing of such books is they inexorably involve a cast of hundreds of witting and unwitting accomplices in their supposed conspiracy, and for good reason. Because they don’t have anything like a compelling, rational case, conspiracists have no recourse but to grasp at every available straw. They will take one piece of evidence that arouses suspicion about an anti-Castro Cuban, and add to it another item that raises questions about some Mafia figure. Then they suggest that some unexplained event implicates the CIA, and another, the FBI. With a wink they will add a tenuous piece of evidence about a second anti-Castro Cuban, then give a nod to another Mafioso, and finally, throw in a couple of rich, anti-Communist businessmen for good measure. When all is said and done, the reader is left overwhelmed, and may even be moved to double-check his or her own whereabouts on November 22, 1963. All this spooky stuff must add up to something coherent.
Anyone expecting Kaiser to provide clarity about who killed JFK would be better advised to go find a game of three-card monte. Your odds of fingering the money card in that rigged game are much better than trying to extract any meaning from The Road to Dallas, and sense out of Kaiser’s fervid imagination.
© 2008 by John McAdams
[1] It must be pointed out, nonetheless, that Kaiser also hedges his bet by stating, “If someone fired a [fourth] shot from the grassy knoll, he missed.” Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 416.
[2] For the latest example of a whitewashed account, see David Talbot’s Brothers.
[3] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 22.
[4] Memorandum for the Record, Carl John Wilson-Hudson, 6 October 1959, Record Number 104-10182-10187, JFK Assassination Records Collection, National Archives (courtesy Mary Ferrell Foundation).
[5] CARL JOHN WILSON aka JOHN WILSON-HUDSON, 3 December 1963, Document ID Number 1993.06.30.12:35:59:530530, JFK Assassination Records Collection, National Archives (courtesy Mary Ferrell Foundation).
[6] “Carlos – John Wilson-Hudson,” 11 July 1978, Record Number 180-10143-10177, JFK Assassination Records Collection, National Archives (courtesy Mary Ferrell Foundation). Trafficante himself flatly denied the alleged visit ever took place. US House of Representatives, Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations 95th Congress, 2d Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 154.
[8] Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Random House, 1993), 362-63.
[9] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 339-40.
[11] The best work on Ruby remains a biography written more than 40 years ago by Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris, Jack Ruby: The Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Kennedy (New York: New American Library, 1967). Kaiser’s utter failure to present a believable alternative to the compelling account by Wills and Demaris is one of the outstanding deficiencies in Kaiser’s book.
[12] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 172.
[13] George De Mohrenschildt Testimony, 9 H 235.
[14] Edward J. Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 558-59.
[15] De Mohrenschildt eventually succeeded in taking his own life with a shotgun. George De Mohrenschildt Death Investigation, 29 March 1977.
[16] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 176-77.
[17] Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (New York: Random House, 1995), 352.
[18] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 179.
[19] Ibid.
[20] The two outstanding works on Oswald are Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and Jean Davison, Oswald’s Game (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983).
[21] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 181.
[22] McMillan, Marina and Lee, 351.
[23] Warren Commission Exhibit (CE) 98, 16 H 433.
[24] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 4.
[25] Murret Testimony, 8 H 187; the literature in Oswald’s possession was listed in the course of Ruth Paine’s Testimony, 9 H 420-21.
[26] CE 1386, 22 H 710-11.
[29] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 183.
[30] Ibid., 202.
[31] Ibid., 203.
[32] Ibid., 234-37. For a recent article disproving the allegation that Oswald visited a mental hospital near Clinton, see Pat Lambert, “The Good Witness: Dr. Frank Silva and ’Lee Harvey Oswald.’”
[33] Two writers have thoroughly debunked the Clinton scenario and the manner in which the eyewitness testimony was developed. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1998), 129-32, 179-80, 185-200, and Dave Reitzes, “Impeaching Clinton.”
[34] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 204.
[35] Ibid., 205.
[36] Charles Murret Testimony, 8 H 187-88.
[37] Ray and Mary La Fontaine, Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1996).
[38] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 1-4, 238-260, 377. It should be pointed out that even if Oswald visited Odio as she claimed, all it would likely prove is that Oswald was still unilaterally trying to infiltrate anti-Castro groups after he left New Orleans, just as he had when he lived there in the summer of 1963.
[39] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 2.
[40] Sworn Testimony of Dr. Burton K. Einspruch, 11 July 1978.
[42] Dave Reitzes, “Another Oswald Sighting: Allegations of Lee Harvey Oswald in Alice, Texas.”
[43] Kaiser points out that Vincent Bugliosi, in his recent non-conspiratorial book on the assassination, actually concurs with the conclusion that Oswald was among those who visited Odio’s apartment. This is a rare instance where Bugliosi seems to have abandoned common sense. Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 1299-1315.
[45] Sworn affidavits of Horace E. Twiford and Estelle Twiford, 11 H 179-80. In addition to their testimony about the telephone call, the Twifords produced an envelope with Oswald’s return address on it, which had been forwarded to Horace from the Socialist Labor Party’s national office. Lastly, the Twiford’s home phone number was listed in Oswald’s address book.
[46] Although the ticket agent was unable to recall Oswald, two passengers on the bus testified they saw Oswald riding alone on the bus when they awoke at 6 AM. Warren Report, 323.
[47] CE 2942, 26 H 401; Odio Testimony, 11 H 370, 374-75.
[48] Kaiser, Road to Dallas, 257-58.
[49] Ibid., 359-60.
[50] Dave Reitzes, “The Prediction of Rose Cherami.”
Friday, April 11, 2008
Kirk Bane: Review of John Dougan's The Who Sell Out (2006)
Source: Special to HNN (4-11-08)
[Mr. Bane is a professor of history at Blinn College.]
In The Who Sell Out (New York: Continuum, 2006), author John Dougan deftly analyzes the connection between pirate radio, Britain’s early pop art scene, Swinging London, and the making of Pete Townshend and company’s brilliant third record. Sell Out, which boasted the compelling single, “I Can See for Miles,” appeared in Britain in December, 1967, and in America one month later. Dougan, a professor at Middle Tennessee State, lauds this “daring and provocative…lysergic” ti