Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

people fashioned theories according to their ecological inclinations:

- Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger conspired to stage the October 1971 Middle East war to piss off the Arabs, who then withheld oil, thereby boosting Rocky's oil profits (right wing).

- Oil companies were using thousands of vacant gas stations around the country to store vast reserves of gasoline (dumped there late at night) until a price hike was forced (middle of the road).

- The oil companies staged the crisis in order to boost profits that started sagging at the end of the Vietnam war (left wing).

- Hundreds of oil tankers laden with crude oil were anchored off the coasts, waiting for the prices to go up so that they could make a killing (lower middle of the road).

- Fleets of UFOs had drained all the earth's petroleum supplies, but the Government was covering it up because it was afraid of mass rioting (hovering just above the road).

Rockefeller, in fact, has probably done more for the New Improved Paranoia than anyone else except the CIA (which he is rumored to own—and now that he's been appointed to investigate it, we can be sure the rumor is true). Rockefeller is everybody's favorite villain, playing a major role in left-wing conspiracies, right-wing conspiracies, even conspiracies against Arthur Goldberg. Like God and the Devil, if Rockefeller didn't exist, he would have to be invented.

One group with a very big Rockefeller fixation is the National Caucus of Labor Committees, sometimes called the Labor Party. Developed out of a weird splinter faction, of the old SDS, the Labor Party does not fall into the usual left/right categories: Its Operation Mop Up people beat up members of leftist groups; simultaneously, they denounce fascism. A paradigm of the New Improved Paranoia is the Labor Party, whose main occupation is constantly purging its members. On the side, it issues seads of leaflets. One, titled "Rockefeller's Nazi Doctors," declares:

We have proof of vast, inhuman, illegal CIA operations of brainwashing and torture—under the cover of "behavior modification" being carried out in prisons, college campuses, hospitals and elsewhere throughout the U.S. and world-wide. The CIA is procuring for employers a docile, zombielike labor force, a population willing

to accept a fine and prison sentence without a light

Another leather case is Rocky's part in this constrictive piece.

U.N. Committee intelligence has uncovered plans by the Rockefeller cabal and the CLA to instigate mass urban riots in the early spring of this year. This CLA-inspired violence is planned to dovetail with the system caused by the Rockefeller-created gas, food and raw-materials shortages and provide the irresponsible conducive to a Rockefeller take-over either through direct military means or by other, less-direct means.

This was supposed to occur last spring. Of course, the reason it didn't, as any Labor Party member will tell you, is that Rocky was afraid to try anything while these Labor Party leaflets were exposing him all over town. But it is said that he did try to get Ford out of the way by arranging for his Nazi doctors to inject Betty Ford with cancer cells, just as they got Jack Ruby in his jail cell in Dallas. The ultimate loser was Richard Nixon, who got so many injections from so many directions that the doctors had to invent a disease for him called phlebitis.

The very best of the New Improved Paranoia focuses on the CIA. Outside the U.S., the CIA is blamed for more evil than even the retired Nazis in the Odessa File, and why not? Considering the CIA's dirty tricks in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and even here in the U.S., there is every reason to be paranoid about Ugly Americans. Proof enough may be found in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by exCIA agent Victor Marchetti.

But did the CIA assassinate J.F.K. . . ? R.F.K. . . ? M.L.K. . . ? Mama Cass . . ? Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist and a sort of John the Baptist of the New Improved Paranoia, suspects it got Mama Cass at least. In his underground-press column "Rumpleforeskin," he said recently: "Cass Elliot was a friend. I believe she may have been killed. She knew an awful lot about the incredible criminal links between Hollywood and Washington and Las Vegas. . . She was also a friend of Sharon Tate's. On the night Bobby Kennedy was killed, she had dinner with Sharon and Roman Polanski at the home of film director John Frankenheimer in Malibu Beach." This is significant, because Krassner believes that Charles Manson, whose tribe murdered Tate, was a CIA stove in a friendish plot to discredit hippies. Now, if R.F.K.

A world corner with nation Take the world corner he was used

over diagrams of bullet trajectories, retrace the route of the motocycle through Dallas, review the famous Zapruder film and study huge blowups of the notorious three tramps who were led away from the grass knoll after the shooting. (Two of them bear an uncanny resemblance to Waterbuggers E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis.) There are conspiracy newsletters published by housewives from Southern California and conspiracy conventions at which they converge to trade the latest into on, say, the X rays of J.F.K.'s brain (recently discovered to be missing from its bottle of formaldehyde in the Smithsonian, according to The New York Times). The usual capstone of the J.F.K. conspiracy theories is that by bumping him off, the CIA engineered a takeover of the U.S. Government. Since 1963, the CIA has been keeping the opposition down with such dirty tricks as putting George Wallace in a wheelchair and switching the road signs at Chappaquiddick.

The protusion of conspiracy theories would be quite bethersome and confusing if not for the sensibleness of the New Improved Paranoia. It allows you to assume that all the theories are true and that if they're not, they might as well be. This frees you to go about your ordinary business untroubled—and unsurprised when your favorite politician is shot by another "lone nut" or when another leftist government falls.

But there's a hitch. The New Improved Paranoia lets you be suspicious and distrustful as long as there is the slightest hint of a reason to be. But there do exist situations where, after a point, the hint of a reason ends. It can be very tricky determining what that point is.

The problem is best exemplified by Dylanologist extraordinaire A. J. Weberman, who is famous for his perusals of Bob Dylan's music and his garbage. It all began years ago, when Weberman immersed himself so completely in the study of Dylan's songs that he became convinced that there were secret meanings in the lyrics, placed there purposely by Dylan for anyone hip enough to decipher them. To make sure, Weberman fed the entire contents of Dylan's songs into a computer and obtained a six-inch-thick, 15-pound concordance