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

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

Book Review

# Another 'Conspiracy' Book About JFK's Assassination

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The publicity blunders for the results of United States that an addition to bring somewhat of a world traveler, its author, Charles McCurry, was chief speech writer for Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1900 campaign. Since Henry Cabot Lodge is remembered more for having slept through the campaign than for having made rousing speeches, this credit would better have remained unmentioned.

Interestingly, Henry Catot Lodge is also remembered as being in charge of JFK's Sargon hungle which resulted in the murders of the brothers Diem and Nhu. All of which brings us back to The Tears of Autumn.

A rumor in Saigon at the time of the coup held that the Ngo Dinhs were liquidated because they were playing footsie with Hanoi. McCarry devotes three lines to this, which is about two lines more than it deserves. The rumor, however, convinced some doubters on the scene that the assassinations were justified.

The real reason the Ngos were removed is that the Knights of Carnelot were persuaded to believe that Diem was no more than a self-seeking petty dictator and Nhu was a mere chief of a brutal secret police force. Not much imagination is needed to guess the source of this characterization. The usual charges of corruption, Swiss bank accounts and police brutality were made, and the Knights succeeded in convincing President Kennedy that this appraisal was accurate. Diem and Nhu had to go.

A plot in August had failed, but the one in November would not. In the meantime, an embarrassing visitor showed up in the United States.

The Tiger Lady, the glamorous wife of Nhu and President Diem's state hostess, arrived from Europe where she had been warmly received. (Even in Communist Yugoslavia at the Parliamentary Congress she was given a standing ovation.) Official Washington, from the President on down, constrained by guilt and shame over the as-yet unexecuted conspiracy, did not greet her. The State Department acknowledged her presence, however, by calling a conference of editors urging that she be buried on page 22. CBS responded by canceling her appearance on "Face the Nation," and the press generally showered her with derision

On November 1 the Nazi commander threw the following at the Nhu land, called Behind them were shot. The Tiger Lady said, "If you have the Kennedy Administration for an ally, you don't need an enemy."

Twenty days after the murders in Sapon there was a murder in Dallas. The Tiger Lady, bitter over the earlier assassination of her husband and her brother-in-law, commented that justice had been served, or words to that effect.

McCarry has expanded this theme, using an ex-CIA man as his vehicle for running down yet another "true" story of Kennedy's death, how the Ngo family avenged the murders of Diem and Nitt, how Oswald was recruited, and how and why John Runy was recruited in connection Oswald. The tale is gripping and implausible enough to make a good movie script.

In order to explain why the avengers were busy recruiting Oswald in late September one month before they had anything to avenge, McCarry has to introduce horoscopes, geomantics and other astrological nonsense. This business enables the avengers to outdo even Jeanne Dixon. They are able to predict not only that they will have something to avenge, but who they will have to kill (JFK), where (Dallas), and when (November 22).

McCarry also suggests that the Russians recruited Ruby (courtesy of the Mafia, but without the Godfather's O.K.) to kill Oswald and thereby "take the heat off" themselves. If this is what the Russians were interested in, it is the least thing they would have done.

Anatoli A. Gromyko (yes, Andrei's son) in his Through Russian Eyes, President Kennedy's 1.036 Days asks the question, "How could it happen that the apparent perpetrator of the crime was liquidated literally before the eyes of everyone, and, naturally, can no longer furnish evidence!"

The jacket of McCarry's book hints that it should be taken seriously. Come now it that's the case, then McCarry joins Harold Weisberg, Thomas Buchanan, Fred Cook, Sylvan Fox, Edward Epstein, and a host of others who have advanced their own, sometimes wild, theories of what really happened in Dallas.

In McCarthy's opinion it is simply as a Pass in the Jack of tales, it is pretty good reading, though not a masterpiece. Metaphors are blurred and tumles stranded. The reader grows weary, occasionally wary, of pious name dropping, not so much of people as of wine, food and places.

Programmed sex, ala Masters and Johnson, intrudes as an extraneous distraction in imitation of today's cruminy literature. The hero's character is not entirely even. He is both a good guy and a CIA man, a currently extinct species. He wouldn't think of using a gun, but he is not beyond asking his agents to use a little close-range bird shot in the face, said not to be fatal but capable of much gore, temporary blindness and "a lot of pain and shock." You'd better believe it.

He wouldn't support a regime that tortures political prisoners, yet he isn't above kidnapping and torturing his own victims. He is an "entirely sentimental" man, interested solely in the facts, ma'am. Yet he manages to develop a maudlin middle-class affection for his erstwhile bedmate of convenience as well as a sentimental passion for his dead President and his country. Even ex-CIA men can't be all bad.

McCarry solves all the mysteries surrounding the deaths of Diem, Nhu and Kennedy excepting one. Who in the world did E. Howard Hunt expect to convince, who wasn't already convinced, when he found a world with no answers to Sigalow R. Nhu, and written on. After all, John Dee couldn't answer that one.