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Chapter 9 Control of the Media
As mentioned in Chapter 1, one of the two clever strategies used by the Power Control Group in the taking of America has been the control of the news media.
For those American citizens who steadfastly refuse to believe that all of the American establishment news media could be controlled by the CIA and its friends in the White House, the continuing support of the Warren Commission's lone assassin conclusion by virtually all of the major news media organizations in November, 1975, twelve years after the event, must have been very puzzling indeed. Since 78% of the public believe that there was a conspiracy in the case, there must be a series of questions in the minds of the most intelligent of the 78% about the media's position on the subject.[1]
This Chapter is intended to enlighten readers and to remind them of the control exercised by the intelligence community and the White House over the 15 organizations from whom the public gets the vast majority of its news and opinions.
Let's begin with 1968-1969. By 1973 the American public had begun to develop a skepticism toward information they received on television or radio. Various news stories appearing in our national news media through those years had brought about this attitude. Some examples are: the Songmy-Mylai incident, the Pueblo story, the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the Pentagon Papers, the Clifford Irving hoax, the Bangladesh tragedy and the India-Pakistan war, Hoover & FBI antics, the Jack Anderson papers, and IT&T and the Republican National Convention.
The general reaction was bound to be, "Don't believe everything you read, see or hear, especially the first time around, and more especially if the story comes from Washington." In the case of the Pentagon Papers, things we all had taken as gospel for nearly two decades suddenly seemed to crumble.
To what extent can the national news media be held responsible for this situation? What has happened to the inquiring reporter and the crusading editor who are both searching for and printing the truth? If a government or a president lies or keeps secrets, can the American news media really find out about it? And if they do, what moral, ethical, political or other criteria should they use in uncovering the lies and presenting them to the public?
Vice President Agnew would have said, "The press is already going too far." Members of the press would have said, "We must remain independent and maintain the freedom of speech." Just how independent is the news media? Is it controlled to some extent by Washington?
The answer to some of these questions can be found by taking an inside look at the major national news media organizations during 1968 and 1969 and how they treated the most controversial news subject since World War II. The assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath is an all-pervading, endless topic. It has yet to reach the Pentagon Papers, Anderston papers, or Mylai stage of revelation. Precisely because it is still such a controversial subject, verboten for discussion among all major news media (unless the discussant supports the Warren Commission), it serves as an excellent case study.
A categorical statement can be made that management and editorial policy, measured by what is printed and broadcast in all major American news media organizations, supports the findings of the Warren Commission. This has been true since 1969, but it was not true between 1964 and 1969.
Of significance in this analysis and what it implies about the American public's knowledge about the assassination and its aftermath is a definition of "major American national news media." It can be demonstrated that an overwhelming mass of news information reaching the eyes and ears of Americans comes from about fifteen organizations. They are, in general order of significance: NBC-TV & Radio CBS-TV & Radio, ABC-TV & Radio, Associated Press, United Press, Time-Life-Fortune-Sports Illustrated, McGraw Hill Business Week, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, New York Times News Service, Washington Post News Service, Metromedia News Network, Westinghouse Radio News Network, Capital City Broadcasting Radio Network, the North American Newspaper Alliance, and the Saturday Evening Post (the Post is, of course, now defunct.)
There are some subtle reasons for this, not generally appreciated by the average citizen. Television has, of course, become the primary source of information. For any nationally circulated news story, local stations rely heavily on film, videotape and written script material prepared and edited by the three networks. Once in a while Metromedia may also send out TV material. In effect, this means that editorial content for a vast majority of the television information seen by American citizens everywhere originates not only with three or four organizations but also with a very small number of producers, editors and commentators in those networks.
A large majority of any national news items printed by local newspapers originates in a small number of press-wire services. AP and UP dominate this area, with selected chains of papers subscribing to a lesser extent to new services of the New York Times, Washington Post, North American Newspaper Alliance, and a very small percentage receiving information from papers in Los Angeles, Chicago and St. Louis.
In a national news story of major significance such as the assassination of John Kennedy, the smaller local papers rely almost exclusively on their affiliated news services. Economic reasons dictate this situation. The small paper can't afford to have reporters everywhere. The major newspapers might send a man to Dallas for a few days to cover the assassination, or they might send a man to New Orleans to cover the Clay Shaw trial. But even the major papers can't afford to cover every part of a continuing story anywhere around the world. So they too rely on UP and AP for much of their material. They also rely on AP, UP and Black Star[2] for most of their photographic material.
In the case of news magazines, the holding corporations become important in forming editorial policy in a situation as controversial as the assassination of JFK. Time Inc. and Life, Newsweek and the Washington Post, U.S. News, and McGraw Hill managements all became involved.
Fifteen organizations is a surprisingly small number, and one is led to conjecture about how easy or difficult it might be to control or dictate editorial policy for all of them or some appreciable majority of them. An article in Computers and Automation[3] reprinted a statement by John R. Rarick, Louisiana Congressman and an entry made in the "Congressional Record" bearing on this subject. In the reprint, the "Government Employees Exchange" publication is quoted as stating that the CIA New Team used secret cooperating and liaison groups after the Bay of Pigs in the large foundations, banks and newspapers to change U.S. domestic and foreign relations through the infiltration of these organizations. The coordinating role at The New York Times was in the custody of Harding Bancroft, Executive Vice President.
A useful analysis consists of examining what happened organizationally and editorially inside each of the fifteen companies following the assassination of President Kennedy. My personal knowledge, plus information available from a few sources connected with the major news media, permits such an analysis to be made for eleven of the fifteen. They are: NBC, CBS, ABC, Time-Life, The New York Times, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press, Saturday Evening Post, Capital City Broadcasting, and North American Newspaper Alliance. In addition, the performance of nine local newspapers and TV stations directly involved in the events in Dallas and New Orleans will be analyzed. These include: Dallas Times Herald, Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Dallas CBS-Affiliate WBAP, New Orleans Times Picayune, New Orleans Times Herald, and New Orleans NBC-Affiliate WDSU-TV.
Most of these organizations had reporters and photographers in Dallas at the time of the assassination or within a few hours thereafter. Most of them had direct coverage available when Jim Garrison's investigation broke into the news in 1967 and during the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969. For many of them the Shaw trial became the running point in the changing of editorial policy toward the assassination. For a few, the Garrison investigation and the Shaw trial took on the aspect of waving a red flag in front of a bull. They became directly involved in a negative way and thus not only reported the news, but also biased it.
Immediately following the assassination the media reported nearly everything that had obviously happened. All was confused for the first few days. The killing of Oswald by Ruby on live television produced even greater confusion.
For one year the major media reported everything, from probable Communist conspiracies to the lone assassin theory. The media waited for the Warren Report, and when it was issued in October of 1964 many of the major media fell into line and editorially backed the Commission's findings. Some questioned the findings and continued to question them until 1968 or 1969. The New York Times and Life magazine fell into this category. But by the time the Shaw trial ended in March 1969, every one of the fifteen major news media organizations was backing the Warren Commission and they have continued to maintain this editorial position since.
The situation would perhaps not be so surprising had not the internal assassination research teams in several of these organizations discovered the truth about the Kennedy killing between 1964 and 1968. These teams examined the evidence and thoroughly analyzed it. No one who has ever taken the trouble to objectively do just that has reached any conclusion other than conspiracy.
In each and every case the internal findings were overruled, suppressed, locked up, edited and otherwise altered to back up the Warren Commission. Management at the highest editorial and corporate level took the action in every instance. Before drawing any further generalization about the performance of the media in the JFK case, it will be revealing to examine what happened and specifically who took what actions in the case of the eleven national organizations and the nine local ones listed earlier.
Time-Life
The Time Inc. organization let Life Magazine establish its editorial policy while Time published more or less standard Time-Life stories. Life became directly involved in the assassination action and evidence suppression from the very beginning, on November 22, 1963.
Life purchased the famous Zapruder movie from Abraham Zapruder on the afternoon of the assassination for about $500,000. The first negative action took place when Life and Zapruder began telling the lie that the price was $25,000 (which Zapruder donated to the fund raised for the widow of Dallas policeman, J. D. Tippit, who had also been murdered that day). Apparently, both Life and Zapruder were ashamed that he profited by the event. He lived in fear that the true price would be revealed until the day he died.
As many readers know, the Zapruder film (viewed in slow motion) proves there was a conspiracy because of the backward motion of the President's head immediately following the fatal shot. It proves the shot came from the grassy knoll to the right and in front of the president while Oswald's purported position was very nearly directly behind him. The film also helps establish that five, and not three shots, were fired, and that one of them could not have been fired from Oswald's supposed sniper's nest because of the large oak tree blocking his view.
Life magazine never permitted the Zapruder film to be seen publicly and locked it up in November 1968 so that no one inside or outside Life could have access to it, automatically becoming an "accessory after the fact". Life helped protect the real assassins and committed a worse crime than the Warren Commission.
In answer to those defenders of Life who will say, "But Life turned over a copy of the Zapruder film to the Warren Commission, and it is available in the National Archives," let's look at the facts. Life did not supply the copy of the film now resting in the Archives. That copy came from Zapruder's original to the Secret Service to the Warren Commission to the Archives. It is available for viewing by the few people fortunate enough to visit the Archives. It can not be duplicated by anyone, and copies can not be taken out of the Archives or viewed publicly in any way. The Archive management responsible for the Kennedy assassination records state that the Life magazine ownership of the Zapruder film is what prevents copies from being made available outside the Archives.
The Warren Commission did not see the film in slow motion. Nor does the average Archives' visitor get to see it in slow motion or stop-action. Yet the most casual analysis of the film in slow motion convinces anyone to conclude there was a conspiracy.
Thus Life magazine is an important part of the efforts to suppress evidence of conspiracy.
Life was involved in several other ways as an accessory after the fact. The organization began its efforts to discover the truth about the assassination in 1964 when it assigned Ed Kern, an associate editor, to investigate. By the fall of 1966, Kern had become convinced that the basic evidence pointed to conspiracy. Life management was also apparently convinced; they published articles in November 1965 and November 1966 questioning the Warren Commission's conclusions.
In the fall of 1966 Life transferred Richard Billings from their Miami office to headquarters in New York. His assignment was to take over the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, and to head a team of several people working full time on it. One of Dick Billings' objectives was to search for and acquire as much of the missing photographic evidence as possible.
This author initiated a similar search, independent from Life magazine, in September 1966. As often happens, people with common objectives decided to work together. Billings and the author arrived at a tacit understanding that any JFK assassination photographs, including TV films or private movies, found by either would be brought to the other's attention. In exchange for access to Life's photographic collection (including the Zapruder film and slides), the author agreed to give Life the results of any analyses of the photographic evidence. In cases where the author could not afford to acquire some new piece of evidence, Life would offer to purchase the materials from the owners and supply copies to the author.
In this manner the author discovered and helped Life magazine acquire the largest collection of photographic evidence of the JFK assassination, outside of the author's personal collection and the collection now located at the headquarters of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations in Washington, D.C. Among the photos discovered were:The Dorman movie Private The Wilma Bond photos Private The Robert Hughes movie Private The David Weigman TV footage NBC The Malcolm Couch TV footage ABC The Jack Beers photos Dallas Morning News The William Allen photos Dallas Times Herald The George Smith photos Ft. Worth Star Telegram The John Martin movie Private Hugh Betzen's photo Private(See Computers and Automation, May 1970)
Many of these were important in proving conspiracy and some showed pictures of the real assassins.
The Life team headed by Billings was in the process of discovering a great deal about the conspiracy during the 1966-1968 period. While editorially not taking a strong position favoring conspiracy, Life did take a position that favored a new investigation by the government. This was editorially summed up in a lead cover story on the fourth anniversary of Kennedy's death in November 1967 with the title, "A Matter of Reasonable Doubt." In that issue, John Connally and his wife were shown examining the Zapruder film's frames and concluding that he had been hit much later in the film than the Warren Commission claimed. This meant that two bullets struck the two men and, by the Commission's own admission, pointed automatically to the conspiracy.
The government naturally did not respond to Life's suggestion for a new investigation, so nothing ever came of that editorial policy. Billings, however, continued his team's efforts and in October 1968 was preparing a comprehensive article for the November anniversary issue. The author continued to work with him and continued being given access to the photos right up to October 1968.
It was at that point in time that a drastic change in management policy occurred at Life magazine. Dick Billings was told to stop all work on the assassination; his entire team was stopped. All of the research files, including the Zapruder film and slides and thousands of other film frames and photographs, were locked up. No one at the magazine was permitted access to these materials and no one (including the author) was ever allowed to see them again.
Simultaneously, editorial and management policy toward the assassination changed to complete silence. Billings and crew were not allowed to discuss the subject at Life, let alone work on it. In November 1968 the article Billings had been working on was turned into a non-entity. A few of the hundreds of photographs collected by the author and purchased by Life were published in the article, along with an innocuous commentary. Credit for discovering the photos was given to a number of people at Life magazine in New York and Dallas, not to the individuals who actually found them.
That article, published nearly nine years ago, was the last word Life has ever uttered about their extensive research probe and their feelings about a conspiracy. Dick Billings moved to Washington, D.C. to become editor of the Congressional Quarterly and is a member on the board of directors of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CTIA).
Who made the policy change decision at Life and why? Various high-level conspiracy enthusiasts claim that the cabal behind the assassination of the President brought extreme pressure to bear upon the owners and management of Time Inc. to silence all opposition to the Warren Commission findings. Others conclude it had something to do with the CIA's control of Life's editorial policy from inside. This author takes no position on why. Dick Billings knows only that the decision was made at high levels and passed downward and that it was irrevocable.
Repeated attempts by the CTIA and several independent assassination researchers to break loose the basic evidence in Life's possession, such as the Zapruder film, the Hughes film, and the Mark Bell Film, met with total opposition and a stone wall. Attempts to break loose the Archives' copy of the Zapruder film or slides met the same stiff opposition. In 1971 Life representatives indicated they might be interested in selling rights to the Zapruder film for a sum in the neighborhood of a million dollars.
CBS
The American public is aware of the editorial policy adopted by the Columbia Broadcasting System toward the Kennedy assassination because of a special four-part series with Walter Cronkite which was broadcast on network TV in prime time in the summer of 1967.[4] That series, while taking issue with some of the work of the Warren Commission and criticizing the Dallas police, the FBI and the Secret Service, nevertheless backed all of the basic Warren Commission conclusions.
Anyone watching the Cronkite series might have wondered why the basic evidence presented by CBS in an itemized format for each of several areas in the case, did not always seem to point to the conclusion reached at the end of each section. The conclusion always agreed with the Warren Commission's comparable conclusion. Some viewers may even have noticed Cronkite's double-take after reading through the basic evidence and then reading the phrase, "and the conclusion is!" It seemed as though he didn't believe the conclusion and hadn't seen it until he came to it in the script.
Actually, that is exactly what happened. CBS management caused the entire script to be changed from one concluding conspiracy to a script supporting the Warren Commission in the last week before the first part of the series went on the air. Cronkite had not seen the entire script until the program went on. Time had not permitted changing all of the points of evidence, so in most cases they were unchanged and only the conclusion was changed.
How did this come about? Who decided to change the script at the last moment and why? Again there are control theories extant, but the author's personal relationships to CBS people might help to shed a little light on the subject.
The discussion with all of the CBS people always centered on evidence of conspiracy and the CBS-TV film footage taken at the assassination site. Bob Richter was the most knowledgeable of all the aforementioned people on the basic evidence and he was firmly convinced there was a conspiracy. Bernie Birnbaum was convinced that a new investigation was desirable and his wife was convinced there had been a conspiracy. Dan Rather believed there was a conspiracy and so did Wes Wise.
CBS photographers Sandy Sanderson, Tom Craven, and Jim Underwood had taken movie-TV footages showing evidence of conspiracy. Craven's footage, for example, showed the assassin's get-away car driving away from the parking lot area behind the grassy knoll about one minute after the shots were fired. Sanderson filmed one of the assassins being arrested in front of the Depository building about 30 minutes after the shots. Most of this footage was either lost or locked up in the CBS archives vaults in New Jersey.
Wes Wise so strongly maintained his opinion about conspiracy that he broadcast appeals for new photographic evidence over the KRLD local TV shows. This was done against the orders of Eddie Barker. Wes became Mayor of Dallas, elected in 1971 and defeated the Dallas-established oligarchy. He actually received a new piece of photographic evidence based on his TV appeal from a Dallas citizen named Bothun, who had taken a picture of the grassy knoll a few moments after the shots.
The script for the Cronkite series was being edited and was going through its final preparation stages in May and early June. The author was in constant touch with Wise, Birnbaum and Richter during this period and was informed about the basic thrust of the script toward conspiracy and recommendations for a new investigation.
On May 8 a dinner meeting took place at the author's New York club with Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum. There, Mrs. Birnbaum and the author tried to convince Bernie that he should take a stronger position on a new investigation.
On May 18, Bob Richter and one of Jim Garrison's investigators met in the National Archives with the author and reviewed the evidence of conspiracy. On June 2, 3 and 4 in Dallas, the author showed Bernie Birnbaum and Wes Wise a film taken by Johnny Martin that showed three of the assassins and their cohorts on the grassy knoll running toward the parking lot a few seconds after firing two shots. Wise and Birnbaum tried to interest Barker and others in taking a look at the film.
On June 14 Bob Richter invited the author to meet Midgely, Lister and Wallace at CBS in New York where an interview was being taped with Jim Garrison for use in the series. At that time Garrison, Richter and the author spent some time with the producer and his assistant discussing the evidence of conspiracy.
Finally, on June 20, just five days before the program was to go on the air, the author met with Richter and Dan Rather in the Washington, D.C. CBS studios. The script was reviewed by Richter and Rather in the author's presence. The gist of the conversation was that Rather and Richter agreed that the conclusions stating conspiracy had to be made even stronger than they were at that time.
The day before the program was aired, Bob Richter assured the author that the theme would point to conspiracy and demand a new investigation. The author telephoned Richter immediately after the first broadcast and asked what had happened. Richter was devastated. He could not understand what had happened. From that time forward his course paralleled that of Dick Billings. He resigned from CBS in disgust and formed his own company, Richter-McBride, in New York. It was his original intent to make a film about the JFK assassination based on his own research and the films he could obtain. However, the massive suppression of the assassination, especially the suppression of the Zapruder film by Time-Life films, cancelled Richter's plans for a film.
Correspondence with Cronkite and others determined that the decision to change the script, distort and hide CBS's own findings and back up the Warren Commission to the hilt came from Midgely and Lister. How much higher did the decision go? Richard Salant was head of the CBS News Division then and, of course, William C. Paley was (and still is) chairman of the board.
By an odd coincidence, in a sequel to the above CBS story, the author had an opportunity to learn a little more about Mr. Paley's knowledge. Jeff Paley, William Paley's son, returned to the United States from Paris in the winter of 1967-1968, where he had been writing news stories and a news column for L'Express and for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a group serving small papers in the United States. Jeff had become convinced there was a conspiracy in the JFK case and came to interview Garrison and others and to do a story for French papers. (European papers and magazines always believed and still do believe in the JFK assassination conspiracy.) He met at length with Richter and the author and became quite disturbed at what CBS had done. He approached his father with the idea that CBS had been wrong in the Cronkite series and that something should be done to rectify the situation.
Bill Paley told his son that he knew nothing about the details of the programs or the work lying behind the conclusions. He said Midgely had been responsible for the entire production. He told Jeff that if he could show proof that the CBS conclusions were wrong and there had been a conspiracy, that he would fire Midgely and all the rest of the team and do the whole thing all over again under new management.
Needless to say, this did not happen and the mystery about where the decision to suppress the truth came from within CBS is as deep as it ever was.
Since June 1967, CBS has remained editorially silent on the subject of the JFK assassination. The photographic evidence of conspiracy in their possession remains locked up and suppressed. The Craven sequence -- film footage by the CBS photographer (who had been in the parade's camera car # 1) of a car driving out of the Elm Street extension (left-to right in front of the Texas School Book Depository) within 20 seconds of the assassination -- was seen by the author and Jones Harris in New York, but was cut out of the film where it appeared prior to the time the author and Richter began searching for it. There is little question that CBS is an accessory after the fact.
CBS edited out one other important piece of TV film. In November 1969, Walter Cronkite conducted a three-part interview with Lyndon B. Johnson at his ranch in Texas. The series was broadcast in the spring of 1970 and on the first program an announcement was made that portions of the taped interview had been deleted at Lyndon Johnson's request, "for reasons of national security."
What actually happened and what Johnson had said six months earlier was made public due to a leak at CBS. The story appeared in newspapers all over the U.S. several days before the broadcast.
Johnson told Cronkite that there had been a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy, that Oswald was not a lone madman assassin, and that he, Johnson, had known it all along. Johnson reviewed the tapes a week or so before the program was to go on the air and then called up the CBS management, asking that his remarks be deleted.
Someone at CBS who was very disturbed by this called a member of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations and told him what had been deleted. This led to the story being printed in the newspapers.
The New York Times
The record of the Times through the 1969-1971 period follows the same pattern as CBS and Life magazine editorial policies.
The early editorials following the Warren Report supported the Commission. The Times cooperated by publishing much of the report in advance. In 1965, however, editorials began to appear that questioned the Commission's findings and suggested a new investigation. In 1964 the Times formed a research team headed by Harrison Salisbury to investigate the assassination. The team of six included Peter Khiss and Gene Roberts. Their conclusions were never made public by the Times but indications point to their finding evidence of conspiracy.
Khiss, in particular, through the 1966-1968 period in several meetings and discussions with the author, expressed doubts about the Warren Report and questioned the lone madman assassin theme. When the Garrison investigation made the news, the Times began a regular campaign to undermine Garrison's case, to support the Warren Commission, and finally (during the Clay Shaw trial) to completely distort the news and the testimony presented. Martin Waldron was the reporter sending in the stories from the Shaw trial, but someone in New York edited them to completely change their content. The author saw the story written by Waldron on the first day of the trial and the final version appearing in the Times. The two were completely different, with Waldon's original following the actual trial proceedings very closely.
The author, writing under the pen name of Samuel B. Thurston, postulated the possibility that The New York Times, on selected subjects, including the JFK assassination, was controlled by the CIA through their representative among top management, Mr. Harding Bancroft.[5]
In the summer of 1968, the author discovered a remarkable similarity between the sketch of the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King and one of the three tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza following the assassination of President Kennedy. Peter Khiss wrote a story about this and it was published by the Times in June, 1968. Apparently that was the final straw for the Times management as far as Khiss was concerned. He was not allowed to do any more research on assassinations or to discuss the subject at the Times. As he told the author in 1969, he doesn't attend any press conferences about assassinations because he doesn't like it when people in Times management say, "Here comes crazy old Pete Khiss again with his conspiracy talk."
The apex of The New York Times actions and editorial positions on the JFK assassination came in November and December 1971. They published three items supporting the Warren Commission eight years after the assassination, at a time when it seemed on the surface to be a dead issue.
The first was a story about Dallas eight years later by an author from Texas who wrote his entire story as though it were an established fact that Oswald was the lone madman assassin firing three shots from the sixth floor window of the Depository building and later killing police officer Tippit.
The second was an Op-Ed page guest editorial by none other than David Belin, a Warren Commission lawyer. He defended the Commission and attacked the researchers. The third was a story by Fred Graham about the findings of Dr. Lattimer, who was allowed to see the autopsy photographs and x-rays of John Kennedy. Graham actually wrote most of his story, which solidly backed up the Warren Commission due to Lattimer's claims that the autopsy materials proved no conspiracy, before Lattimer ever entered the Archives.
In other words, it appears that Graham knew what Lattimer was going to find and say in advance. Either that or someone in Washington, D.C. gave someone at the Times orders in advance to prepare the story for the first page, upper left-hand corner, of the paper. It really didn't make any difference whether Dr. Lattimer ever saw the x-rays and photographs.
The concerted campaign on the part of the Times management could have been timed to prevent a discovery of new evidence of conspiracy in the autopsy materials. The reason for this possibility developing in the November 1971 period is that the five-year restriction placed on the autopsy evidence by Burke Marshall, a Kennedy family lawyer, expired in November of 1971. Four well-known and highly reputable forensic pathologists, Dr. Cyril Wecht of Pittsburgh, Dr. John Nichols of the University of Kansas, Dr. Milton Helpern of New York City and Dr. John Chapman of Detroit had already asked permission to examine the x-rays and photos upon the expiration of the five-year period. All four were known to question the Warren Commission's findings. What better way to freeze them out of the Archives than to select a doctor who could be trusted to back up the Commission (Lattimer had published several articles doing just that), commission him to go into the Archives, and then persuade The New York Times to publish a front page story in its Sunday issue demonstrating that no one else need look at the materials because they supported the Warren Commission's findings.
All attempts by researchers to convince Times management that the other side of the story should be told have been completely ignored. Lattimer's findings, if correct, actually prove conspiracy. The Times has been informed of this but they have shut off all discussion of the subject. The complete story of the complicity of the New York Times in the crimes to which they have become an accessory would take up an entire volume.[6]
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company became an active participant in the government's efforts to protect Clay Shaw and to ruin Jim Garrison.
Two of NBC's high-level management people, Richard Townley of NBC's affiliate in New Orleans, WDSU, and Walter Sheridan, executive producer, became personally and directly involved in the Shaw trial. They were indicted by a grand jury in New Orleans for bribing witnesses, suppressing evidence and interfering with trial proceedings. NBC top-level management backed Sheridan and Townley.
NBC produced a highly biased, provably dishonest program personally attacking Garrison and defending Shaw prior to the trial. Frank McGee, who acted as moderator, later had to publicly apologize for lies told on the program by two "witnesses" whom NBC paid to give statements against Garrison. The FCC ruled that NBC had to give Garrison equal time because the program was not a news program but a vendetta by NBC against Garrison. NBC did give Garrison 30 minutes (compared to their one-hour attack) to respond at a later date. Sheridan was the producer of the one-hour show.
With Sheridan and Townley so deeply involved, and with such an extremely strong editorial position favoring the Justice Department, the Warren Commission, and the lone assassin stance, suspicions were raised about NBC's and RCA's independence.[7] At one point in 1967 the president of NBC, according to Walter Sheridan, helped in the bribery efforts by calling Mr. Gherlock, head of Equitable Life Insurance Company's New York office, and asked for assurance that Perry Russo, who worked for Equitable, would cooperate with NBC.
NBC is also the owner of several important pieces of photographic evidence. A TV film taken by NBC photographer David Weigman was suppressed by NBC and not made available to researchers. It shows the grassy knoll in the background just a fraction of a minute after the shots. Some of the assassination participants can be seen on the knoll.
Fortunately for researchers, NBC sold the Weigman film to the other networks and to the news film agencies before realizing its importance. The author was able to purchase a copy from Hearst Metrotone News.
NBC's affiliate, WBAP in Fort Worth, has several important film sequences. James Darnell took several sequences on the grassy knoll and in the parking lot which should contain important evidence. Dan Owens took TV movies in and around the Depository building which should show how the snipers' nest was faked on the sixth floor, and one of the assassins in front of the building.
ABC
Of the three major television networks, ABC has remained more objective and appears to be less under the thumb of the government than the other two. For example, when NBC was busy defending the Warren Commission and Clay Shaw and attacking Jim Garrison, ABC was giving Garrison a free chance to express his views without interruption on their Sunday program, "Issues and Answers." They have never taken an editorial position one way or another on conspiracy. However, in the Robert Kennedy assassination case, the investigation was suppressed at ABC. The man heading the brief investigation was stopped and sent to Vietnam. The man at ABC who called the shots in stopping the investigation and in suppressing evidence in ABC's possession was a lawyer named Lewis Powell.
The evidence owned by ABC is a video tape of the crowd in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom before, during and after the shots were fired in the kitchen. The ballroom microphones, including ABC's, picked up the sound of only three shots above the crowd noise. Since Sirhan fired eight shots, or certainly more than three, and since Los Angeles police tests proved that Sirhan's gun could not be heard in the position of the microphones in the ballroom, the ABC film and soundtrack is important evidence of three other shots.
The sequence was originally included in the TV film of Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign and assassination entitled, "The Last Journey." Following a meeting at ABC when the management learned what the film showed, the next TV broadcast of "The Last Journey" (scheduled for the following week) was cancelled without any logical explanation. The next time the film appeared on ABC (late 1971), the three-shot ballroom sequence had been cut.
United Press International
Of all the fifteen major news organizations included herein, UPI has come closest to really pursuing the truth about the JFK assassination. Yet they, too, have suppressed evidence, have not had the courage of their convictions in analyzing conspiratorial evidence, and by default have become accessories after the fact.
Two different departments at UPI became involved in the photographic evidence of the JFK assassination. The regular photo news service department, which receives wire photos and negatives from many sources all over the world, accumulated a large collection of basic evidence both from UPI photographers and by purchasing wire service photos from newspapers, Black Star, AP and other sources. This department has made all of its photographs available to anyone at reasonable prices ($1.50 to $3.00 per print).
UPI photographer Frank Cancellare was in the motorcade and snapped several important photographs. In addition, five other photographs at UPI, taken by three unknown photographers, are significant. All of these were purchased by the author from UPI.
The other department has not been as cooperative. Within the news department at UPI, Burt Reinhardt and Rees Schonfeld have varied in their attitude and performance. UPI news purchased the commercial rights to two very important films shortly after the assassination. These were color movies taken by Orville Nix and Marie Muchmore (private citizens). Both show the fatal shot striking the President, and both show evidence of conspiracy. In the Nix film, certain frames (when enlarged) show one of the assassins on the grassy knoll with a rifle. Both movies show a puff of smoke generated by another one of the men involved in the assassination.
UPI, under the direction of Burt Reinhardt, did several things with the Nix and Muchmore films. They produced a book, "Four Days," including several color frames from the movies. They made a composite movie in 35mm from the original 8mm movies. The composite used the technique of repeating a frame several times to give the appearance of slow motion or stop action during key sections of the films. Reinhardt, Schonfeld and Mr. Fox, a UPI writer, made the composite movie available to researchers at their projection studio in New York in 1964 and 1965.
Fox and Schonfeld wrote an article for Esquire in 1965 which portrayed the Nix film as proving the conspiracy theories about assassins on the grassy knoll to be false. This was deemed necessary by UPI management because a New York researcher and a photographic expert, after seeing the Nix film at UPI, claimed it showed an assassin with a rifle standing on the hood of a car parked behind the knoll.
The research team had used a few frames from the film in color transparencies and enlarged them in black and white to show the gunman.
In 1964, UPI gave the Warren Commission copies of both the Nix and Muchmore films for analysis. The films were later turned over to the National Archives under a special agreement between UPI and the Archives. This agreement reminds one of the agreements between the Archives and the Kennedy family on the autopsy materials, and the obscure one between Life magazine, the Commission, the Secret Service and the Archives on the Zapruder film.
The UPI agreement prevents anyone from obtaining copies of the Nix and Muchmore films or slides of individual frames for any purpose. The agreement is just as illegal as the other two, yet it has been just as effective in suppressing the basic evidence of conspiracy.
In 1967, UPI, apparently still not sure they would not be attacked by researchers on what the Nix film revealed, employed Itek Corporation to analyze the film. (At least it would appear on the surface that UPI did the hiring.) Itek Corporation, a major defense contractor, did an excellent job of obscuring the truth. In an apparently highly scientific analysis using computer-based image enhancement, they "proved" that not only was there no gunman on the grassy knoll, but there was no person on the knoll at all during the shooting.
The final Itek report was made public and highly publicized by UPI. It looked as though the UPI earlier claim of no gunman had been scientifically substantiated. As a by-product, Itek got some great publicity for their commercially available photo-computer image enhancement system.
What the public did not know was that UPI gave Itek only 35mm enlarged black and white copies of selected frames from the Nix film. The great amount of detail is lost in going from 8mm color to 35mm black and white. And UPI gave Itek carefully chosen frames from the Nix film that did not show the gunman on the knoll.
UPI and Itek defined "the grassy knoll" in a very limited and carefully chosen way so as to exclude five people (in addition to the fatal-shot gunman) on the knoll who appear in the Nix film as well as in every other photograph and movie taken of the knoll at the time the shots were fired.[8] In addition, man No. 2, who had ducked down behind the stone wall during the Nix film, could not be detected by Itek because they only had the Nix film.
Three men standing on the steps of the knoll, and two men behind the picket fence, were completely ignored or overlooked.
The author began to contact Schonfeld and Reinhardt in early 1967, viewed the two films both at UPI and in the Archives, and requested copies of the original 8mm color films or color copies of individual frames. The response to the requests were negative for more than four years. During this time, however, the author, a New York researcher, and a photographic specialist, enlarged in color the correct frames from the Nix film. The enlargements clearly show the gunman, not on top of a car but in front of a car, with his rifle poised. He is standing on a pedestal protruding from the eight-sided cupola behind the stone wall on the knoll. The car is parked behind the cupola and can be seen in several other photographs and movies.
Unfortunately, UPI's agreement with the researcher prevents making public the color enlargements. UPI has consistently suppressed this evidence. In 1971, they offered to make the film available for a very large sum of money, but they have never agreed that it shows anyone on the knoll and they will not make copies available for research.
The UPI editorial position (in articles, the book Four Days, letters and news releases) has supported the Warren Commission through the years. The major difference between UPI and Life or CBS is that no drastic reversal of management policy took place at UPI.
AP
Associated Press became an accessory after the fact by taking an action unprecedented for a news wire service. It published a three-part report by three AP writers in 1967, completely supporting the Warren Commission. The report was transmitted by wire to all AP subscribers over a three-day period and it occupied a total of nine to ten full pages of the average newspaper. It was not news, but editorial policy and took a position supporting the Warren Commission and the official government propaganda about the assassination of John Kennedy.
Most small newspapers rely on UP and AP for their news stories. The three-part AP report ran in hundreds of papers across the United States without opposition commentary. For many this was the gospel at the time. What more could the conspirators and their government protectors have asked?
AP photographers were on the scene in Dallas during the assassination. James Altgens, one of AP's men assigned to Dallas, took seven important photographs in Dealey Plaza. Henry Burrows, an AP photographer from Washington, D.C., was in the motorcade and snapped two pictures. Four other AP photographers took ten important photographs. AP's photo department and Wide World Photos in New York purchased many other photographs taken in Dealey Plaza.
Meyer Goldberg, manager of Wide World Photos, set a policy early in the 1966-1967 period which placed AP in the position of partially suppressing basic photographic evidence. The policy contained several parts. First, Goldberg made it extremely difficult for anyone to obtain access to the photographic evidence, particularly the negatives. Second, he set a high enough price on copies of photographs ($17.50 for one 8x10 black and white print) to freeze out all but commercially-financed interests. Third, when an original negative was discovered, the print order, when cleared by Wide World, was always cropped. (Full negative prints showing important details in the Altgens photographs were nearly impossible to purchase.) Whenever any suggestion was made to Wide World that their photographs contained basic evidence of conspiracy, Goldberg and AP management turned blue with anger and literally refused to discuss the subject or permit research in their files.
Various researchers, including Josiah Thompson, Raymond Marcus and the author met this type of stiff opposition, but after many visits discovered ways around it. The staff at Wide World in charge of the photographic files was more cooperative, and at least one staff member was completely convinced there was a conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
Nevertheless, the broadly announced editorial policy and stance of Associated Press between 1964 and 1972 fully supported the Warren Commission and the lone assassin fable.
Newsweek
Newsweek's editorial policy and coverage of the assassination and its aftermath was largely the doing of one man, Hugh Aynesworth. Aynesworth was the Dallas-Houston correspondent for Newsweek following the assassination. He was in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was killed, and he turned in several stories during the days and weeks following November 22, 1963. His point of view was always closely allied with that of the Dallas police, the district attorney and the FBI. He wholeheartedly supported the Warren Report.
However, in May of 1967, after Garrison's investigation hit the news, Aynesworth wrote a violent attack on Garrison's investigation, and it was published in Newsweek. Aynesworth accused Lynn Loisel, a Garrison staff member, of bribing Al Beaubolf to testify about a meeting to plot the assassination. Beaubolf later denied this accusation in a sworn affidavit and proved Aynesworth and Newsweek to be fabricators of information.
Saturday Evening Post
The position of the Saturday Evening Post solidified after the Garrison probe became public. It was based in large part on the reporting of one man, James Phelan. Phelan wrote a blistering article for the Post published on May 6, 1967. He attacked Garrison and Russo, and claimed that Russo's original statement to Assistant D.A. Andrew Sciambra differed from his later testimony. In view of the earlier editorial position of the Post when Lyron Land and his wife questioned the Warren Commission findings, the Phelan article came as somewhat of a surprise. In fact, the Post had taken a strong conspiracy stand when in 1967 it published a long article excerpted from Josiah Thompson's book, Six Seconds in Dallas, and featured it on the magazine's cover.
The Garrison investigation, however, turned the Post around. Phelan became directly involved in the case, and in a sense was more of an accessory than Walter Sheridan or Richard Townley. He travelled to Louisiana from Texas, spent many hours with Perry Russo and other witnesses, and generally obfuscated the Shaw trial picture.
Phelan joined the efforts to persuade Russo to desert Garrison and to help destroy Garrison and his case. According to a sworn Russo statement, Phelan visited his house four times within a few weeks. Phelan told Russo he was working hand-in-hand with Townley and Sheridan, that they were in constant contact, and that they were going to destroy Garrison and the probe. Phelan warned Russo that he should abandon his position and that Russo would be the only one hurt as a result of the trial. Phelan claimed Garrison would leave Russo alone, standing in the cold.
Phelan offered to hire a $200,000-a-year lawyer from New York for Russo if he would cooperate against Garrison. He asked Russo how he would feel about sending an innocent man (Clay Shaw) to the penitentiary. Phelan left New Orleans and Baton Rouge and returned to New York, only to telephone Russo several times and offer to pay Russo's plane fare to New York to meet with him and discuss going over to Clay Shaw's side.
Phelan was subpoenaed by Shaw's lawyers during a hearing in 1967 because his article attacked Garrison. Sciambra welcomed the opportunity to cross-examine Phelan on the stand. He described the article as being incomplete, distorted and tantamount to lying. Sciambra said, "I guarantee that he (Phelan) will be exposed for having twisted the facts in order to build up a scoop for himself and the Saturday Evening Post.""
Sciambra went on to say that Phelan had neglected the most important fact of all in his article. It was that Phelan had been told by Russo in Baton Rouge that Russo and Sciambra had discussed the plot dialogue (to assassinate JFK) at their initial meeting.
Capital City Broadcasting
This organization owns several radio stations in the capitol cities of various states and in Washington, D.C. Their interests in the JFK assassination increased in 1967 and 1968 when the Garrison-Shaw case made headlines. A producer at Capital City, Erik Lindquist, decided to do a series of programs designed to ferret out the truth. The author furnished various evidence for scripts to be used in the programs. After several months of work the project was cancelled, presumably by top management, and the broadcasts never took place.
North American Newspaper Alliance
This newspaper chain, with papers affiliated in small communities through the northern and eastern U.S., supported the Warren Commission findings as did all the other major newspaper services and chains.
The Alliance also became involved in the Martin Luther King case and it circulated the syndicated column by the black writer and reporter, Louis Lomax, who had taken an interest in finding out what really happened in the King assassination.
Lomax located a man named Stein who had taken a trip with James Earl Ray from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The two retraced the automobile trip of Ray and Stein, beginning in Los Angeles and heading through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. They were trying to find the telephone booth from which Ray had called a friend named Raoul in New Orleans somewhere along the route. Raoul, according to Ray, was the man who actually fired the shot that killed King. Stein remembered that Ray told him he was going to meet Raoul in New Orleans and that Ray phoned Raoul at someone's office. Stein couldn't remember exactly where the phone booth was because he and Ray had been driving non-stop day and night.
Lomax wrote a series of articles depicting Raoul as the killer and Ray as the patsy. He sent them to the Alliance, a column each day, from the places along the retraced trip he and Stein took. Finally, Lomax's column announced they had found the phone booth at a gas station in Texas and that he was going to obtain the phone number Ray had called in New Orleans. He presumably was planning to visit the local telephone company office the next morning and obtain the number.
That was the last Lomax column ever to appear in the North American Alliance papers. He seemed to disappear completely. The readers were left hanging, not knowing whether he obtained the phone number or whether he discovered who it belonged to. The Committee to Investigate Assassinations located Lomax several months later and asked him what had happened.
He said he had been told by the FBI to stop his investigation and not to publish or write any more stories about it. He said he found the phone number and where it was located in New Orleans. He gave the number to the Committee to Investigate Assassinations. He said he was afraid he would be killed and decided to stop work on the case.
Whether North American Newspaper Alliance management knew about any of this remains unknown. What is known, however, is that Louis Lomax died in a very mysterious manner in 1970. He was traveling at a very high speed and was found dead in a car crash, according to the State police report. Lomax's wife says he was a very careful driver and never drove at high speeds.
Dallas Newspapers
The two newspapers in Dallas, The Times Herald and The Morning News, became accessories after the fact. They suppressed evidence of conspiracy and evidence concerning the Dallas police role in framing Lee Harvey Oswald. It was not immediately established that the management policy of both papers supported the official positions taken by the Dallas police and district attorney, the FBI and the Warren Commission. During the first few days immediately following the assassination, both newspapers printed anything that came along. The editions on November 22 through 25 make very interesting reading for the researcher because the stories were printed before anyone had any idea what to suppress. (For example, there are stories about other people being arrested, about other rifles being found near Dealey Plaza, and about Oswald's rifle being a Mauser and a British 303 model.)
Editorial and management policy took over within a couple of weeks and the lone assassin story received all the attention from then on. The two papers have not since made any independent inquiries, have not been interested in any conspiratorial discussions, and have remained completely faithful to the official governmental position.
There were some inquiring reporters around (like Ronnie Dugger, for example, or Lonnie Hudkins), but they were eventually silenced by management or the FBI and Dallas police. Photographers at the two papers left town or were frightened out of talking about the case or their photographs. Some of these photographs showed evidence of conspiracy, including pictures of three conspirators under arrest in Dealey Plaza. Other photographs proved that members of the Dallas police planted evidence in the Depository building to frame Oswald.
Between the assassination and 1967, the management and owners of the Herald and News were not completely aware of the significance of some of the evidence in their files. Nor were they attempting to control their reporters and news staff. For example, Hudkins found that Oswald had been a paid informer for the FBI. He even found what his pay number had been (S172). He took the information to Waggoner Carr, Texas Attorney General, in January of 1964. Carr brought it to the attention of the Warren Commission. Hoover denied it, and the matter died in secret executive sessions of the Warren Commission.
Several photographs taken by Dallas Morning News photographer Jack Beers proved that the police created the so-called "sniper's nest" from which Oswald allegedly fired the shots. The pictures show the positions of cartons in the sixth floor window before the police moved them. Beers's photographs also indicate that the police made the large paper bag found inside the Depository building.
Beers was permitted to use his photographs commercially in a book that he published jointly with R. B. Denson, called Destiny in Dallas. If it were not for that event, researchers would probably never have seen Beers's photographs. Once the Morning News editor, Mr. Krueger, discovered that the photographs demonstrated both conspiracy and the complicity of some of the Dallas police force, he locked them up. The pictures remain suppressed to this date.
The Times Herald's record is not much better. Through 1967 John Masiotta, the man in charge of the assassination photographs taken by William Allen, made copies available on a very limited basis. The basis in the author's case was that a total of twelve pictures out of seventy-three taken by Allen could be purchased. The author was allowed to examine 35mm contact prints (about 3/4 X 1/2 inches) of the rest, and the selection decision was extremely difficult. Three of Allen's photographs showed the "tramps" under arrest who were part of the conspiracy.
In 1968 the Times Herald management realized the implications of some of Allen's pictures in pointing out the real assassins, and locked their files. To date they have not permitted anyone to see the photos again or to purchase copies.
One photograph taken by Dallas Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson was so obviously in opposition to the official police position that it was suppressed by late 1966. Jackson was riding in one of the news photographer's cars in the motorcade with Dallas Morning News photographer, Tom Dillard. As Jackson's car approached the Depository building and travelled north on Houston Street, between Main Street and Elm Street, Jackson snapped a picture (see map in May 1970 Computers & Automation article). At the time, the Kennedy car was already on Elm Street and was probably close to the position where the first shot was fired. Jackson's car was eight cars behind Kennedy's (about twenty car lengths).
Jackson can be seen taking this picture in the Robert Hughes film and in some of the TV footage taken by other photographers. He also testified that he took the picture. When the author asked Masiotta about the Jackson photo in early 1967, he became very flustered and claimed to know nothing about it. Jackson himself was finally located and, when asked about it, became very angry and denied taking a picture. That photograph has never been seen by anyone outside of the Times Herald staff. It's not difficult to speculate about what it probably showed, since the Hughes film, the Weaver photo, the Dillard photo and the Tom Alyea TV sequence all show the same thing. Jackson's photo, without doubt, showed "Oswald's window" in the Depository building empty when Oswald should have been in it -- an embarrassing counterpoint to Jackson's testimony that he saw someone in that window with a rifle. If Jackson's photo (or anyone else's for that matter) showed Oswald in the sixth floor window, the whole world would have heard about it on November 22, 1963.
Fort Worth Star Telegram
The Fort Worth Star Telegram shines like a light in the Texas darkness. It made photographic evidence from five of their photographers, Joe McAulay, Harry Cabluck, Jerrold Cabluck, George Smith and William Davis available to everyone. Even though the Telegram's editorial stance was eventually pro-Warren Commission, the photographers, editors and the woman who ran the photo files were all cooperative.
George Smith's photos showed the three members of the assassination team under arrest. Jerrold Cabluck's aerial photos were instrumental in establishing Dealey Plaza landmarks and topography. Joe McAulay's photos of a man arrested in Ft. Worth in connection with the shooting might yet become valuable.
TV Station WFAA
The second shining light in Texas was TV station WFAA, an ABC affiliate. WFAA was very cooperative (albeit expensive) in providing copies of all their photographic evidence. TV sequences by Tom Alyea, Malcolm Couch, A. J. L'Hoste and Ron Reiland were made easily viewable and the copies made available. Much of this evidence demonstrating conspiracy was also sold to TV networks and newsreel companies.
WBAP -- Ft. Worth
The NBC affiliate in Ft. Worth, WBAP, was less cooperative. Even though public statements were made that viewing of Dan Owens and Jim Darnell's footage was possible, many roadblocks were thrown into the path of researchers. As mentioned in the section on NBC, Darnell's footage of the knoll and parking lot is very important. It has remained unavailable at WBAP.
KTTV -- Dallas
Independent TV station KTTV in Dallas also suppressed, or lost, valuable evidence of conspiracy. Don Cook's TV footage contained twelve important sequences. One is a sequence of a man being arrested in front of the Depository building at about 1:00 p.m. From other evidence it is possible to determine that the man may be William Sharp, participant in the assassination. Cook can be seen in a picture taken by Phil Willis pointing his 16mm TV film camera directly at the man from about ten feet away.
Willis' photo does not show the man's face. For this reason, Cook's close-up footage is very important. In 1967 the author interviewed Cook in Dallas and found that his film had been turned over to the editor at KTTV. A phone call to the station resulted in a statement being made to the author that Cook's footage had been lost "on the cutting room floor" and was not available for viewing. No further efforts have even been made to open up KTTV's evidence in the assassination.
New Orleans Newspapers
The only two publications in the United States that printed the truth about the Clay Shaw trial were the New Orleans Times Picayune and the New Orleans Times Herald.
Between 1963 and 1967 both New Orleans newspapers used AP and UP stories on most of their coverage of the Kennedy assassination. Suddenly, the papers found themselves deeply involved in the middle of the sensational Garrison investigation, and in 1969 they reported on the Shaw trial.
The papers took no editorial position on Jim Garrison, the trial, the investigation, the assassination, or the guilt or innocence of Shaw until after the final verdict was delivered by the jury. Then both papers savagely attacked Garrison on the editorial page. Off the record, the reporters and others at both papers supported Garrison. This was reflected in a book published by the two Herald reporters, Rosemary James and Jack Wardlaw, called Plot or Politics.
The management and editors of the newspapers evidently paid more attention to forces from Washington and New York than they did to New Orleans citizens or the testimony at the trial.
But the verbatim proceedings at the Shaw trial, as well as all of the detailed events for the two years that the Federal Government successfully delayed the trial, were faithfully printed in both the Herald and the Picayune. While you and I, dear reader, were treated to a highly biased account for three years concerning events in New Orleans by Time magazine, Newsweek, U.S. News, The New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, UP, AP, etc., the average New Orleans citizen was well aware that the Justice Department, under both Ramsey Clark and John Mitchell, was responsible for continually delaying the trail. (You and I were fed the impression that Garrison delayed the trial.)
Mr. New Orleans citizen, let's call him Joe, knew that Shaw's lawyers were paid by the CIA. You and I were told that Shaw paid his lawyers a lot of money and suffered financially because of it.
Joe knew that the FBI was looking for Shaw under his alias, Clay Bertrand, before lawyer Dean Andrews ever mentioned the name associated with Lee Harvey Oswald just before he was killed by Jack Ruby. You and I were told that Andrews fabricated the name Clay Bertrand out of whole cloth, and no mention was made to us of the FBI's search.
Joe knew that twelve people saw Clay Shaw together with Oswald and David Ferrie on many occasions, exchanging money on two occasions. You and I were led to believe by Time and The New York Times that only three people saw them together and that the three were not credible witnesses.
Joe knows how Garrison was hounded and framed by the Justice Department in a fake pinball rap. More importantly, he knows the government did not want Regis Kennedy, FBI agent, and Pierre Finck, Army doctor at the JFK autopsy, to testify at the trial.
Finck's testimony, however, was printed in the Times Picayune but not in Time magazine. He said that an Army general gave orders during the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The unidentified general told Finck and the other doctors not to probe the President's neck wound. We did not read about this or hear about it.
The Times Picayune record of the Shaw trial was especially accurate. The Herald's record was reasonably accurate, but because the paper was printed by 3:00 p.m., the paper missed some of the longer sessions.[9]
WDSU-TV -- New Orleans
As mentioned in the section on NBC, WDSU became directly involved in the JFK assassination aftermath because of Rick Townley and Walter Sheridan. Both were under indictment by Garrison for bribing witnesses and tampering with evidence. Townley, on the staff of WDSU, was close to the action with Garrison, Shaw, Andrews, Ferrie, Perry Russo, Layton Martens, Gordon Novel, Sergio Arcacha Smith, David Lewis, David Llewelyn, Guy Banister, and many other participants in the drama.
According to accounts in the New Orleans papers and repeated in Paris Flammonde's book The Kennedy Conspiracy, Townley tried to get Perry Russo, Garrison's prime witness at the Shaw trial, to change his testimony at the upcoming trial to make it seem that Garrison had hypnotized him and then asked leading questions to get Russo to testify against Shaw.
Townley went to Russo's house twice, threatened to discredit him and perhaps have him fired from his job, and offered him a chance to work closely with NBC in their efforts to "destroy Garrison and his case." Townley told Russo he could get Shaw's lawyer, F. Irving Dymond, to go easy on him if he would alter his testimony. He assured Russo that his employer, Equitable Life, had promised the president of NBC that no retaliation would be taken against Russo if he cooperated with WDSU and NBC.
Walter Sheridan told Russo that NBC and WDSU could set him up in California (where Russo always wanted to live) if he helped break the Garrison probe's back. NBC would pay his expenses there, protect his job, obtain a lawyer for Russo and guarantee that Garrison would never extradite him to Louisiana. Sheridan told Russo that NBC had flown Gordon Novel out of Louisiana to McLean, Virginia (home of the CIA) and had given Novel (an important witness for Garrison's case) a lie detector test. Sheridan said NBC would make sure Novel would never be extradited to Louisiana to testify. (Novel never was extradited.)
Townley also tried to influence Marlene Mancuso, former wife of Gordon Novel, and an important Shaw trial witness. He told her that she should cooperate with WDSU and NBC because Garrison was going to be destroyed and that NBC was not merely willing to discredit the probe: he said Garrison would go to jail.
On July 10, 1967, Richard Townley was arrested and charged with attempted bribery and two counts of intimidating two witnesses. He was also accused of serving as an intermediary to influence cross-examining trial attorneys that the character and reputation of Perry Russo not be damaged.
Sheridan was arrested on July 7 on the counts of intimidating witnesses and attempted bribery. Both posted bond. Townley's statements, however, did come true. The Federal Government, aided and abetted by WDSU and NBC, did crucify Garrison.
The author's belief is that this kind of behavior in the face of all the evidence gathered by the staffs of their own organizations, on the part of 15 to 24 major news media management groups is highly suspect. It might be that each major news organization shut up about the Kennedy assassination because each was afraid of losing face or influence, FCC licenses, business or advertisers, or Government favors of one kind or another.
This theory is perhaps best exemplified by a story told by Dorothy Kilgallen, before she died, to a close friend. Kilgallen was writing several articles about the JFK assassination for the newspapers who published her column. She strongly believed there had been a conspiracy that included Jack Ruby. She interviewed Ruby alone in his jail cell in Dallas (the only person outside of the police who had this opportunity). She told her friend shortly afterward that she was planning to "blow the case wide open" in her column. She said the owner of the New York newspaper where her column appeared refused to let her print stories in opposition to the Warren Commission. When the friend asked her why, Dorothy said, "He's afraid he won't be invited to White House parties any more".
Of the three possible motives for suppression in the news media, the influence from the top and from high government places seems the most probable. When will we, as Americans, learn the truth about influence in the case of the Kennedy assassination?
Conclusions
The pattern of internal knowledge of conspiracy followed by the complete suppression of such information is too strong to ignore. Two conclusions suggest themselves as one reviews the evidence regarding suppression and secrecy.
The first is that our national news media are controlled on the subject of the assassination by some very high level group in Washington. The orders to cease, desist, and suppress came from the top in each case. To influence the very top level of all fifteen major news media organizations would have taken a great deal more than money, power, or threats. In fact, the only kind of appeal which seems likely to have had a chance of shutting everyone up is a "highly patriotic, national security," kind of appeal. It was probably just such an argument that worked with the Warren Commission. Judging by the fact that Lyndon B. Johnson told Walter Cronkite there was a conspiracy and then successfully persuaded CBS to edit this out of his remarks "on grounds of national security," this kind of an appeal obviously does work.
The second possibility, rather remote from a probability standpoint, should nevertheless be considered. It is that all 15 to 24 news organizations reached a point of exasperation and disbelief in 1968-1969. It's possible the top managers of these 24 organizations reached this exasperation point independent of one another. Within a two to three-year period, culminating in the Shaw trial and discrediting of Jim Garrison, every one of these managers might finally have said, "Stop, cease, desist, lock the files, you're fired, shut up, I don't want to hear another word about it."
1976
How, one may ask, could all of this have happened in the world's greatest democracy? What has become of the principles of the Founding Fathers, Horace Greeley, Will Rogers and others, in which the "free" press is supposedly our best protection from the misuse of governmental power. Didn't things change with Watergate? What about the New York Times and the "Pentagon Papers," the Washington Post, Bernstein and Woodward, Watergate, NBC's white paper on Vietnam, Sy Hersh and the CIA stories in the New York Times?
The actions taking place in November-December, 1975 and on into 1976, proved the media were still influenced and controlled by the same forces that controlled the media in 1968 and 1969. Some of the names of the players were different: Ford for Nixon, Colby for Helms, Kelley for J. Edgar Hoover. But the forces were the same. The chairmen of the boards and presidents of NBC, CBS, ABC, Time, Inc., Newsweek-Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, UPI, AP, and the rest, were still very much controlled and influenced by the White House and the Secret Team. Some of the influence was by infiltration, as Fletcher Prouty so aptly demonstrated.[10]
The Secret Team members were to be found everywhere at or near the top. Other influence came from the Ford administration through direct or indirect pressure. The FCC, the IRS, the Department of Commerce, the military and other government agencies had some control over the media or the personal lives of the top managers. (It must be remembered that Gerald Ford was and is one of the cover-up conspirators in the JFK case.)
What is the Evidence?
What is the evidence for this? One measures the influence by results. In an era when all who have really examined the basic evidence know there were conspiracies in the JFK and RFK assassinations, we still find the 15 organizations concluding there were lone, demented gunmen in the two cases.
For example, CBS broadcast a two-part special on November 25 and 26, 1975, once again reinforcing their stand that Oswald acted alone. Except for the substitution of Dan Rather as chief narrator in place of Walter Cronkite, the cast was the same as in the 1967 four-part series. Leslie Midgely was the producer, Bernie Birnbaum, the associate producer, and Jane Bartels, Birnbaum's girl-Friday. Eric Sevareid and Eddie Barker were missing. So was Bob Richter, another 1967 associate producer who had discovered the truth about the conspiracy and the way CBS handled it. (He now manages his own film-making company, Richter-McBride, in New York.) Richter's opinion about the 1967 CBS four-part special, as expressed in an interview with Jerry Policoff published in New Times magazine in October 1975,[11] barred him from becoming a consultant to Midgely on the November 25 and 26 programs.
Hard Evidence Never Mentioned
Time, Inc., in their November 17, 1975 issue supported the lone assassin myth as they have since 1964.[12] Since Life was no longer in existence, Time management used Time and People magazines to further the causes of the White House and the CIA in the cover-up of the cover-ups. The November 3, 1975 issue[13] of People magazine hand-picked a group of "researchers" and portrayed them as obvious maniacs who believed in and furthered the conspiracy theories being bandied about. One of the favorite tricks of the media throughout the years has been to couple the words "conspiracy" and "theory" together; never once did the major media mention any of the hard evidence pointing to conspiracy in any of the four major cases. The Time policy and article, according to Jerry Policoff, was commanded from the very top, above Hedley Donovan's level.[14]
The fine hand of David Belin can be traced in the Time article. All of the 1964 arguments against conspiracy were aired once again, as though they were brand new.
The Forces of Good vs. the Forces of Evil: A Life and Death Struggle
David Belin: Belin shows up in several places. He constructed a new CIA-White House base on behalf of his superiors by personally writing most of Chapter 19 of the Rockefeller Report on the CIA and the FBI. That material was used by Belin and others to try and shore up the Warren Commission defenses.
The reader may ask, "Why did Belin appear on `Face the Nation' on November 23, 1975 and get himself on the front page of the New York Times on the same day by proposing the reopening of the JFK case?"[15] The answer lies in Belin's own explanation. He wants America to see that a new investigation will confirm the findings of the Warren Commission, thereby strengthening the country's faith in its government. Just how did Belin manage to get on "Face the Nation" and on the first page of the New York Times? To answer that you must analyze the life and death struggle that is going on between the forces of evil who want to continue the cover-ups, and the forces of good who want to expose the truth. Senators Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart and the Church Committee's subcommittee looking into the JFK assassination were not the push-overs that Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg and others once were. There were also Henry B. Gonzalez and Thomas Downing and their new resolutions in the House, not to mention Don Edwards' subcommittee and Bella Abzug's subcommittee.
The evil forces needed to muster the strongest counterattack possible at this stage. For them it was a matter of life and death. So they rounded up David Belin, Joseph Ball, Wesley Liebeler, John J. McCloy, Dr. John Lattimer, the old Ramsey Clark panel of doctors who secretly went into the Archives in 1968, and some of the coterie of writers who were in their camp in the 1960's.
"I've Seen No New Evidence"
Any doubts about Belin's recruitment by Ford and the White House disappeared with Gerald Ford's press conference on Wednesday, November 26, 1975. A reporter asked Ford whether he would support reopening the JFK investigation.[16] He said, "I, of course, served on the Warren Commission. And I know a good deal about the hearings and the committee report, obviously. There are some new developments -- not evidence -- but new developments that, according to one of our best staff members (David Belin), who's kept up to date on it more than I, that he thinks just to lay those charges (of conspiracy) aside that a new investigation ought to be undertaken. He, at the same time, said that no new evidence has come up. If those particular developments could be fully investigated without reopening the whole matter that took us 10 months to conclude, I think some responsible group or organization ought to do so. But not to reopen all of the other aspects because I think they were thoroughly covered by the Warren Commission."
Thus Ford, in one of his own inimitable paragraphs, tried to give the impression that he was following the lead of David Belin -- rather than the other way around -- in the continued cover-up efforts. Earl Warren was always saying, "I've seen no new evidence." Ford, Belin and the rest were forced to echo this refrain, as though all of the things that have been learned since 1964 about the real assassins of John Kennedy and their planners and backers, were false rumors or stories and theories created out of whole cloth by the researchers and later by Congress.[17]
Pure Coincidence?
One CIA-White House lackey is James Phelan, formerly a freelance writer for the old Saturday Evening Post. Phelan was brought out of mothballs to do a pro-Warren Commission piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine section.[18] By pure coincidence, it happened to appear on the same day that Belin's arranged interview was found on page one. The Times is one of the worst, if not the worst, news media organization on the evil side of the battle.
An article in the July 1971 issue of Computers and Automation[19] shows that the CIA control of the Times had for years been directed through Harding Bancroft, the Secret Team member there. He controlled all stories and editorial positions on domestic assassinations. He undoubtedly arranged for both stories to appear on the same day.[20]
CBS. Cover-Up Broadcasting System
The Belin appearance on the CBS show, "Face the Nation", was no doubt timed to coincide with the first two parts of the new CBS whitewash series. (The new name for CBS is "Cover-Up Broadcasting System".) The men at the top made the decisions in 1967 and 1975 to support the Warren Commission, and Leslie Midgeley carried them out. In 1967 the entire program format was changed by top management from pro-conspiracy to pro-Warren Commission in the last ten days before the first show went on the air.[21] By 1975 there wasn't any doubt about the conclusions. Midgeley and Co. started out with the lone assassin thesis and, as the Warren Commission did, merely sought witnesses, experts and explanations that would back it up, while they totally ignored everything else.
The CIA's man at CBS who controlled this policy is not known. Personal experiences and contacts within the organization by the author have led to the conclusion that it is someone below the level of William C. Paley and above the level of Midgeley. That leaves Richard Salant and one or two other possibilities. Salant is known to have had intelligence connections through the decades since World War II.
Too Perfect Timing
CBS and the New York Times are sometimes simultaneously orchestrated by the evil forces. One example was the CBS show preview by the Times on November 24 (the show was scheduled to appear on November 25 and 26).[22] The article, written by John J. O'Connor, was a reverse-psychology strategy by the top managements of both organizations and was used to reinforce their pro-Warren Commission policies. To quote O'Connor, "In bringing some facts to bear on the feverish speculation, CBS News is less sensational but more telling." This was in reference to David Susskind and Geraldo Rivera on Channel 5 in New York, and ABC, who the Times believed provided no facts in disputing the lone assassin conclusion.
How did O'Connor and the New York Times take a look at the CBS shows two days in advance while other publications and reviewers had to wait and watch it with the rest of us? There goes the orchestration again.
Newsweek Editorial Position:
Schweiker, Hart and Gonzalez Misled by Kooks
The Washington Post-Newsweek situation is a little more mystifying. It is difficult to believe that Katherine Graham, owner of both publications, is a Secret Team member. The Newsweek story on the JFK assassination, published in the issue of April 28, 1975[23] was not as blatantly pro-Warren Commission as the Time article. Yet it left the impression with the readers of Newsweek that editorial position regarded the researchers as kooks who misled or talked Senator Schweiker and Representatives Gonzalez and Downing into the wrong attitudes. "Oswald did fire the shots" is the Newsweek message. Individuals at Newsweek like Evert Clark did not really believe this. So where did the pressure come from? Mrs. Graham herself, or Benjamin Bradlee at the Post, or someone else near the top of Newsweek? With reporters like Bernstein and Woodward, and Haynes Johnson who later moved into management, it is strange that the Post supported the Warren Commission. Yet that has been the Post's editorial stance since 1964. It remains adamant in its continuing contention that lone madmen assassinated our three leaders and attempted to assassinate Wallace.
Eliminate Areas of Doubt
Researcher Jim Blickenstaff, disturbed by a Newsweek article in April of 1975, wrote to the editors. Madeline Edmundson replied for them. "It was certainly not our aim to discredit those who doubt the conclusions of the Warren Commission or to express opposition to a reopening of the investigation of John F. Kennedy's assassination."
Yet, Newsweek did exactly that and, in effect, took the same editorial position it had taken in May, 1967, when CIA lackey Hugh Aynesworth was doing their dirty work. (Aynesworth later did the CIA's dirty work and supported the Warren Commission for the Dallas Times Herald.) The new position in favor of reopening the investigation was the one taken by Belin. It was expressed best by Harrison Salisbury, the man at the New York Times who knew better. Salisbury was quoted in Newsweek saying, "A new investigation is needed to answer questions of major importance. We will go over all the areas of doubt and hope to eliminate them."
UPI: Accessory After the Fact in the JFK Conspiracy Cover-Up
AP and UPI have not repeated their 1967-1968 performances recently in which they sent out the longest stories ever broadcast over their news service wires. They were so long that they were divided into installments. The stories backed up the Warren Commission and attacked the researchers, especially Jim Garrison. UPI, of course, became an accessory after the fact in the JFK conspiracy cover-up by suppressing the original 8mm color films by Marie Muchmore and Orville Nix. It went even further by employing Itek Corporation to prove there was no one on the grassy knoll.
In July of 1975 a UPI alumnus, Maurice Schonfeld, published an article in Columbia Journalism Review[24] that subtly contended one of the riflemen on the knoll as seen in the original Nix film was either an illusion or a man without a rifle.
"Expert" Opinions
Itek: Itek is still at work helping out their friendly employers, the U.S. government and the CIA. Itek analyzed the Zapruder film and the Hughes film on the CBS program aired in November of 1975, giving its "expert" opinion that all shots fired in Dealey Plaza came from the sixth floor window of the TSBD Building.
Maurice Schonfeld, perhaps unwittingly, did a favor for researchers in his Columbia Journalism Review article that revealed that two officials of Itek, Howard Sprague and Franklin T. Lindsay, were CIA Secret Team members. So when Ford, Belin and Salant or whoever at CBS needed help, all they had to do was call upon good old Itek and Howard Sprague. (Frank Lindsay has since departed.)
AP: Faithful to the White House and CIA
Associated Press has been editorially silent since 1969. They have faithfully broadcast all of the White House-CIA cover or planted stories without comment.
Keeping the Lid On
Los Angeles Times: The Los Angeles Times, controlled by Norman Chandler who was strongly influenced by the Ford administration, the CIA and Evelle Younger (the Attorney General of California), produced a complete cover-up effort in the Robert Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Younger, of course, was D.A. in Los Angeles County when RFK was killed. He and Ed Davis, L.A. Police Chief, teamed up with Joseph Busch, assistant D.A., to cover up the conspiracy evidence. The Times for a short, unguarded period allowed reporter Dave Smith to publish the truth about the assassination. This stopped in 1974, after Al Lowenstein stirred Vincent Bugliosi, Baxter Ward, Thomas Bradley, and finally Governor Pat Brown, Jr. to take a new interest in the case.
Younger influenced Chandler to shut off the flow of information through the Los Angeles Times. Chandler, who contributed to the Nixon campaign, undoubtedly was strong-armed by both Nixon and Ford (or the CIA) to support the position of the Los Angeles police and the D.A.'s office. Ronald Reagan and his immediate deputy at the time also helped sway Chandler and others in California to keep the lid on.
Zapruder Film Broadcast on Two Occasions
The American Broadcasting Corporation was the first of the television networks to seemingly break away from CIA-White House control. In the spring of 1975, after Robert Groden, Dick Gregory, Ralph Schoenman and Jerry Policoff decided to release and publicize a clear, enlarged, stop-action color copy of the Zapruder film, the ABC show hosted by Geraldo Rivera, Good Night, America, showed the film on two occasions. Rivera might have made this move against the wishes of top ABC management. Rumor had it during the summer months that he was in hot water with high level people. All doubts about ABC's position disappeared when they broadcast an assassination special during the week of November 17, 1975 that supported the lone assassin theory.
"Conspiracy Fever"
"Commentary:" One surprising newcomer to the cover-up conspiracy group is Commentary. The liberal, open-minded, non-government magazine Commentary broke their pattern in the October 1975 issue[25] when it published an article by Dr. Jacob Cohen from Brandeis University which attacked the researchers as paranoid conspiratorialists. Cohen has been writing these defenses for the Warren Commission for over ten years. This article was republished in several other places in November, 1975, as part of the orchestrated campaign by the CIA-White House.
A Straight News Story
U.S. News and World Report: U.S. News may be one of the few media publications to change positions. On September 15, 1975 they ran a story entitled, "Behind the Move to Reopen the JFK Case". It was a straight news story about Senator Schweiker's efforts and list of uncovered evidence raising new questions. The article closed with: "Numerous Americans who long have doubted the Warren Commission conclusions will be watching what the Senate does with his (Schweiker's) idea." That is as close as any of the fifteen organizations came to saying they believe the Warren Commission was wrong.
A Breath of Fresh Air
Saturday Evening Post: Like a breath of fresh air from the heartland of America in Indianapolis, Indiana, the revived Saturday Evening Post (Bobbs Merrill subsidiary) took an editorial stance. The Post not only published several strong articles on the assassinations but also called for reopening all of the cases, supported the Gonzalez-Downing resolutions, and offered a sizable reward for information leading to conviction of the murderers of John F. Kennedy.[26] Thus the Post joined the ranks of the National Enquirer, National Tattler, National Insider, Argosy, Penthouse, Gallery, Genesis and other publications of this type, plus nearly all the "underground newspapers" in calling for new investigations.
CIA Operatives Are Serving as Journalists
For News Organizations Abroad
Variety: On November 12, 1975, Variety published an article on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees' suspicions about relationships between the CIA and broadcasting organizations.[27] Variety said the committees were probing the CIA's influence on the media organizations, particularly management connections, and commented, "A central issue in the investigations is reports of financial dealings with the CIA and media firms with extensive overseas staffs."
William Colby admitted that CIA operatives were currently serving as journalists for news organizations abroad, and that "detailmen" were assigned abroad to news organizations, often without the knowledge of management. Ronald Dellums, California representative asked Colby in an open session of a House hearing if the CIA had ever asked a network to kill a news story. Colby would not answer specifics in open session, so the panel went immediately behind closed doors to grill him for several hours.
Conclusions
It is to be hoped that all committees in the House and Senate will investigate the Secret Team members in the 15 media organizations and their influence and control over editorial policies on domestic assassination conspiracies. It is also to be hoped that the committees will investigate the role of then-president Gerald Ford and his working relationship to various CIA people in the original cover-up of the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Certainly, David Belin's relationship to the CIA and to Ford in the media cover-up campaign needs be investigated.
Fletcher Prouty claimed in his November, 1975 article in Gallery Magazine, "The Fourth Force,"[28] that Belin is a CIA operative. Prouty says, "The Rockefeller Commission did not look into this (the Fourth Force-CIA) because it had been penetrated on behalf of the CIA by David Belin, its chief counsel and former counsel of the Warren Commission. In fact, Belin still reports to the CIA." If this is indeed true, it explains every move Belin has made since 1964 and it also explains the mysterious way he appeared and reappeared on the front pages and editorial pages of various major newspapers, on choice television shows, and on the Rockefeller Commission.
If the Congress leaves the media-government-CIA link untouched -- more serious than any of the other problems raised by the assassination conspiracies and their cover-ups -- the United States might, in fact, be headed for the real 1984.
Postscript
On April 27, 1976 The New York Times published a story on the Senate Intelligence Committee revelation that the CIA would be keeping twenty-five journalist agents within the news media.[29] The Committee disclosed that George Bush planned to keep these people in the media positions that they had occupied for a long time.
The significant point about the story was a statement by a Committee staff member that many of the individuals were in executive positions at American news organizations. Bush had directed that the CIA stop hiring correspondents "accredited" by American publications and other news organizations. The Times recognized that the pivotal word in Bush's directive was "accredited." "Executives who do not work as correspondents are apparently not covered by Mr. Bush's directive, nor are freelance writers who are not affiliated with a specific employer." The article also said that in most cases the media organization was not aware of the individual's CIA connection.
This was yet the best confirmation that the CIA had its Secret Team members planted at the top of the media. Only one executive is required at the top of a media organization to control it when needed. Since the CIA had twenty-five executives planted, that figure is more than enough to control the fifteen media organizations mentioned in this chapter.
Who are they? The answer can be supplied by watching where the decisions come from to halt or change the news about domestic political assassinations.
The indications from the analysis in this chapter are that the following media executives are among the twenty-five retained by the CIA: Harding Bancroft, Jr. (New York Times); Richard Salant (CBS); George Love (Time, Inc./Life); Walter Sheridan (NBC); Lewis Powell, lawyer (ABC); and Benjamin Bradlee (Washington Post).
Accessories After the Fact is the title of a book by Sylvia Meagher, published by Bobbs Merrill in 1967, accusing the Warren Commission and the various government agencies of covering up the crime of the century. This book accuses the national news media of the same crimes.
Black Star is a New York based organization made up of free-lance photographers, called stringers, in every major city. They do contract work for news media with Black Star acting as contracting agent.
Samuel Thurston, "The Central Intelligence Agency and The New York Times," Computers and Automation, July, 1971.
CBS-TV Special on the Assassination of John Kennedy -- June 25, 26, 27 and 28, 1967.
Computers and Automation, July, 1971
For a more detailed analysis of the Times' culpability and selective bias in reporting the facts of the assassination, see Jerry Policoff's October 1972 article in The Realist: "How All the News About Political Assassinations In the United States Has Not Been Fit to Print in The New York Times."
A detailed review of NBC's performance and Walter Sheridan's and Richard Townley's involvement is given in The Kennedy Conspiracy by Paris Flammonde.
Those interested in more detail are referred to the map in the May 1970 issue of Computers and Automation on the JFK assassination. The UPI definition of "the grassy knoll" was the area bounded by the picket fence, the stone wall, the top of the steps on the south, and the cupola.
For a comparison of New Orleans newspapers and all other media coverage of the Shaw trial, see the author's unpublished book The Trial of Clay Shaw -- The Truth and the Fiction.
Prouty, L. Fletcher, The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Prentice Hall, 1973.
Policoff, Jerry, "The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy", New Times, October, 1975.
"Who Killed JFK? Just One Assassin," Time magazine, November 24, 1975.
"Up Front -- Did One Man With One Gun Kill John F, Kennedy? Eight Skeptics Who Say No," People, November 3, 1975.
Author's discussion with Jerry Policoff, November 29, 1975.
"Warren Panel Aide Calls for 2nd Inquiry Into Kennedy Killing", New York Times, November 23, 1975, p. 1.
Transcript of Gerald Ford Press Conference New York Times, November 27, 1975.
For a summary of the evidence and scenario about what it shows the reader is referred to two articles in People and the Pursuit of Truth: "The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy the Involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Plans and the Cover-Up," May 1975, and "Who Killed JFK?," October, 1975. Both by the author.
Phelan, James R., "The Assassination," New York Times Magazine Section, November 23, 1975.
Thurston, Samuel F. (psuedonym for Richard E. Sprague), "The Central Intelligence Agency and The New York Times" Computers and Automation, July, 1971.
Bancroft retired in early 1976. A successor has undoubtedly been groomed by the CIA. However, Bancroft still has a strong influence at the Times on the subject of assassinations.
Based on a discussion among the author, Dan Rather, and Robert Richter at CBS in Washington, D.C., approximately ten days before the first Cronkite-CBS section of the 1967 four-part series on the JFK assassination.
O'Conner, John J., "TV: CBS News is Presenting Two Hour-Long Programs on the Assassination of President Kennedy", New York Times, November 24, 1975.
"Dallas: New Questions and Answers," Newsweek, April 28, 1975.
Schonfeld, Maurice W., "The Shadow of a Gunman," Columbia Journalism Review, July-August, 1975.
Cohen, John, "Conspiracy Fever," Commentary, October, 1975.
Saturday Evening Post, September, October, November and December, 1975 issues.
"D.C. Digs Deep Into TV News Ties With CIA," Variety, November 12, 1975.
Prouty, L. Fletcher, "The Fourth Force," Gallery November, 1975.
"CIA Will Keep More Than 25 Journalist-Agents," New York Times, April 27, 1976, p. 26.
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