Material Transfer Agreement

After twenty-something years, Praise From a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation Critics of the Warren Report is nearly out of my life.

Finally. I’m tempted to add that word to the first sentence. But that may sound a bit mocking, or scornful.

Yet the publisher has paid me off and officially declared the book out of print. The last surviving critic, Vincent J. Salandria (pictured), who some have also called the first critic, died in the summer of 2020.

Now, it all belongs to the ages.

During the book’s research and writing phase I amassed quite a bit of physical data. The project was completed years ago, but – much to the consternation of my wife – this data has sat and sat and sat, and taken up space, in what used to be my office but is now her office.

My ace in the hole was Baylor University in Waco, TX. Or so I thought. Some years back a curator of Baylor’s Penn Jones collection told me he’d be happy to take this stuff off my hands when the time came. But I waited too long; this fellow is no longer there, and Baylor is no longer accepting material like this.

But Hood College is. They’re in Frederick, Maryland. The papers of Harold Weisberg (with goose), Sylvia Meagher, and Ray Marcus are already there; I plundered them way back when. Weisberg’s vast collection has been mostly digitized and is accessible via the web. At least some of the Sylvia Meagher material is online but is far less organized. I don’t know the status of the Marcus material.

And now Hood is taking my stuff. It includes the papers of Vince Salandria, one of several foundations for my book. Long ago, when I first agreed to accept it, Vince told me his wife would otherwise burn it as soon as he was dead. Happily, it has been spared that fate.

I have sorted out the most important stuff from redundant stuff and expect to hand it off to a Hood representative sometime this spring. It consists mostly of correspondence, books, clippings, magazines, and a few oddities.

Praise From a Future Generation will never, of course, be completely out of my life – in spite of what I wrote at the top. How could it be? It will likely be a year or two before any of the materials destined for Hood are accessible to interested parties. Not that I anticipate a flood, or even a trickle, of interest. I’m just glad it won’t end up in a fire pit, or a landfill, which was my fear after Baylor and several other institutions took a pass. (My dream is for this material, and everything relating to the early Warren Report critics, to be in a central location – the Smithsonian, say. Another topic for another time.)

As I write this, most of my collection has been boxed up. Legally it may not be what is called a material transfer agreement – but I am giving, and Hood is accepting. I have signed a Deed of Gift. What remains is for the Hood curator and me to align our schedules and figure out a workable plan to meet at an undisclosed location halfway across the country, to transfer boxes from my vehicle to his.

Out Of Print

It’s the end of the road for Praise From a Future Generation.

A few days ago, as this is written, I received an unexpected letter from its publisher, Wings Press, informing me of their decision to shitcan the book once and for all. (Some choice excerpts from this letter are below.)

The letter surprised me. Aside from the e-book edition, I thought it already was out of print!

The letter included a royalty check covering the last three years. This too surprised me, although its miniscule amount did not. I didn’t think they owed me a farthing.

How miniscule was the check? Let’s just say we’re not using it to put a swimming pool in the back yard, and leave it at that. But I didn’t write the book expecting to make money. I hope that’s been obvious all along.

In any case, hard copies of the book now belong to the ages. Or something like that.

If you are reading this, you are among the tiniest of tiny minorities who are aware this book even exists (assuming you didn’t arrive here by chance). It is the story of the JFK assassination through the eyes of the “first generation”  Warren Report critics, a small group of private citizens who immediately saw the lone nut assassin story for the transparent nonsense it was, and always has been.

Wings Press still has a handful of copies, pending my nonaction that dooms them to the landfill. I have an option to buy some or all at less than market value. Pass. Let them return to the earth, from whence they came!

The e-book remains, although if it’s unchanged from the version I saw when we prepared it a few years after the hard copy, it's poorly done – more like a PDF of the book, rather than liquid text that resizes itself to the dimensions of an e-reader.

In any case, I must look at this as the final chapter (no pun intended) in the saga of writing this damned thing. It’s a little sad, of course. The finished product represents a lot of work. Research began around 2000 or so, and it was finally published in 2007 – in itself, a minor miracle. But it’s already been in the rear view mirror for a long time.

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Priscilla is Heard

The Muses Are Heard is a largely forgotten book by Truman Capote. Published in 1956, it is a nonfiction account of an American company of Porgy and Bess and its visit to the Soviet Union.

When I first read it a dozen or so years ago I was surprised by the appearance of someone associated, indirectly, with the JFK assassination. To wit: one Priscilla Johnson, later Priscilla Johnson McMillan.

Johnson was ostensibly a journalist when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole in November 1959, some four years after the events in The Muses Are Heard. She profiled Oswald, a supposed defector, for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Right after the assassination, claiming she “had been thinking about him ever since” their 1959 meeting, Johnson wrote another article, “Oswald in Moscow.” It supported the argument that Oswald shot JFK largely because he was a publicity seeking lone nut.

Sometimes journalists get lucky: they’re in the right place at the right time. Was this the case with Johnson and her Moscow meeting with Oswald? Elements of her tale smell funny: she worked for John F. Kennedy in the early 1950s, when Kennedy was a Massachusetts Senator, and sought employment with the CIA, without success. So the story goes.

Priscilla Johnson testified before the Warren Commission. Later she befriended Oswald’s widow Marina and began writing a book, Marina and Lee. After its publication in 1977 she became a persistent and reliable supporter of the lone nut scenario, drawing on her brief acquaintance with Lee Oswald and longer acquaintance with Marina to pose as an expert. (As this is written she is still alive at 92, according to her entry in Wikipedia.)

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And lo! She makes a cameo appearance in The Muses Are Heard. This short work, remember, describes events that took place in late 1955 – some four years before Priscilla Johnson’s encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Capote accompanied an all-Black cast of Porgy and Bess to Russia, part of an entourage that included the wife of the opera’s lyricist, Ira Gershwin. The trip was newsworthy as the first performance of an American theatrical company in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik revolution. (The New Yorker magazine picked up Capote’s tab, and serialized The Muses Are Heard before it appeared in book form.)

Capote wrote his piece in the first person – “observant, gossipy, bitchy, and always entertaining,” said biographer Gerald Clarke – inserting himself among his subjects. At one point he described how the cast, before one of their own performances, attended a ballet in Moscow.

Sitting in the row ahead, there was one girl whose hair was neither plaited nor a sour bundle of string; she had an urchin-cut, which suited her curious, wild-faun face. She was wearing a black cardigan, and a pearl necklace. I pointed her out to Miss Ryan.

“But I know her,” Miss Ryan said excitedly. “She’s from Long Island, we went to Radcliffe together! Priscilla Johnson,” she called, and the girl, squinting near-sighted eyes, turned around. “For God’s sake, Priscilla. What are you doing here?”

“Gosh. Gee whiz, Nancy,” said the girl, rubbing back her tomboy bangs. “What are you doing here?”

Miss Ryan told her, and the girl, who said she was staying at the Astoria, explained that she had been granted a lengthy visa to live in the Soviet Union and study Russian law, a subject that had interested her since Radcliffe, where she’d also learned the Russian language.

“But, darling,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “how can anyone study Russian law? When it changes so often?”

“Gosh. Ha ha,” said Miss Johnson. “Well, that’s not the only thing I’m studying. I’m making a kind of Kinsey report. It’s great fun, gosh.”

“I should think,” said Miss Ryan. “The research.”

Gosh. Johnson added that she was writing and submitting articles to American magazines. “Priscilla,” Miss Ryan whispered to Capote, “is sort of a genius.”

She also participated in a “pub crawl” through Moscow with Capote, Miss Ryan, and several others, “indulging [Capote’s] lifelong passion for ... foul-smelling, vile places,” Gerald Clarke wrote.

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An Atlantic article about Priscilla Johnson McMillan, published at the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, called her the only person to know both JFK and Oswald – “his killer,” as the stuffy rag dutifully referred to him.

Not so fast! Capote made the same claim. In “A Day’s Work,” a story collected in Music for Chameleons, he said he was a guest at a dinner party hosted by then-Sen. JFK. He described meeting Oswald in a story/interview with, of all people, Robert “Bobby” Beausoleil, who, when Capote talked to him, sat in prison for crimes associated with Charles Manson and his murderous “family.”

“Does that make you the only one that knew both of them, Oswald and Kennedy?” a startled Beausoleil asked, after Capote’s revelation.

“No. There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. [sic] in Moscow. She knew Kennedy, and she met Oswald around the same time I did.”

True? Maybe. I’m not sure the chronology adds up. More to the point, Capote had an uneven relationship with truth, and for me at least, has almost no credibility anymore. I have been an admirer of his in the past, and still think his oeuvre contains some very fine work. But you need a good bullshit detector.

Capote is, or was, an inveterate liar. “He took substantial liberties for the sake of lively reading,” Gerald Clarke wrote of The Muses Are Heard. “In one case he invented a whole scene.”

Not only that, he fabricated sections of his acknowledged masterpiece, In Cold Blood. This, alas, is beyond dispute. As with any liar, once a falsehood is exposed it reflects negatively on everything you’ve ever done, said, or written.

What, then, of Priscilla Johnson McMillan? I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the characterization in The Muses Are Heard. Am I applying a double standard? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a judgment call.

Priscilla Johnson applied to the CIA in the early 1950s, according to the Spartacus website and other sources. Her application was supposedly rejected. Yet there she is, an American in Moscow during the Cold War. Seems highly unusual to me.

Could the encounter between Johnson, Capote, and Miss [Nancy] Ryan have been just a coincidence? Or could she have taken a seat one row before Capote and her erstwhile classmate in order to be spotted, thereby enabling her to keep surreptitious tabs on these Americans? Johnson, of course, dismisses the idea out of hand: “There’s a lot of stuff like that online,” she told The Atlantic.

I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe it’s only a literary curiosity, or maybe it’s absolutely nothing. But it’s at least worth knowing about; the intelligence swamp surrounding the Kennedy case is legendary.

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Notes

Capote meeting JFK is in Capote, A Biography, by Gerald Clarke. Also referenced in “A Day’s Work,” collected in Music For Chameleons. This collection includes “Then It All Came Down,” with the Beausoleil conversation.

Gerald Clarke discusses Capote having invented scenes for The Muses Are Heard and In Cold Blood in his biography. Surprisingly, the bio makes no mention of Oswald. Capote inventions are also  discussed in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields, and Truman Capote, by George Plimpton

Vincent J. Salandria

Vincent J. Salandria died this past August at the age of ninety-two. It was my great privilege to befriend Vince after meeting him in Dallas in 1998.

Shortly after his death I was contacted by the host of “Black Op Radio,” a show out of Vancouver, and asked to be one of many participants in a tribute episode. My portion was recorded by phone on a Wednesday and the show was webcast the following evening.

To be blunt, I did not want to be involved. This was in part because I don’t do well on the air. But I felt I owed it to Vince, so I wrote up some remarks. When the host called to record our conversation I said I would simply read what I had written: “It lasts about four minutes.” After a long pause the host replied, “The last guy talked for over an hour.” Clearly he expected more. Regardless, I read the text reproduced below (trying to sound spontaneous), suffered through a Q&A that extended my participation by another ten or fifteen minutes, then wrapped it up.

The host did not ask about my book (the subject of this blog). No great loss – but I would like to say here that, for better or worse, it would not have been written without Vince Salandria. As described below, he gave me several boxes of his assassination-related correspondence that formed the initial raw material that got me started, and in time evolved into the book.

Vincent J. Salandria was one of just a handful of people who began to independently investigate the JFK assassination immediately after it happened. With his brother-in-law Harold Feldman he traveled to Dallas in the summer of 1964, where he talked to Marguerite Oswald and interviewed key witnesses like Helen Markham. That same year he wrote one of the earliest articles demonstrating what we might charitably refer to as flaws in the Warren Commission version of events.

Before I continue, Len, I have to say that I suspect Vince would not approve of any tributes to his work, like what we’re doing now. He was known for his humility, and not all that interested in getting credit for any of his research. To him it was much more important to find the truth, and put that truth before the public. Sylvia Meagher once said that while other early critics might bicker over credit for one discovery or another, Vince never concerned himself with any of that. Some of his friends even teased him about his humility, calling him “St. Vincent.” But he knew what he was about. As Christopher Sharrett once observed, Salandria “always knew he packed the gear.”

His contribution to our common cause is undeniable and immeasurable. He and Harold Feldman saw, virtually from Day One, what had really happened. Even at that early stage they both viewed it as a high-level killing, and felt the only the real question was the scope of the conspiracy.

In the 1970s Vince told Gaeton Fonzi that, and I quote, “the tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but to repression...” end quote. He said that nearly fifty years ago, but we need look no further than Lafayette Square in Washington, DC this past June to see that Vince Salandria’s insight remains valid, and that there is a direct line from November 1963 to today.

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I met Vince at the 1998 COPA conference in Dallas. About a year later he asked me whether I’d be interested in taking possession of his assassination-related correspondence, much of it dating back to the 1960s.

When I hesitated, he added, “My wife will just burn it all as soon as I’m dead.”

I think he was only joking, but that ended up tipping the scales. I said yes, and wound up with what I still consider raw material of great historic significance.

I only met Vince in person that one time, but over the next dozen or more years we had countless telephone conversations and emails. He consistently impressed me – not just with his insight, but with his encouragement and generosity.

In 2013, just before the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I asked him for his thoughts on the occasion. I’ll conclude my remarks to you by quoting his reply:

“The debate over the killing of President John F. Kennedy interminably rambles on. It dumps mountains of trash on the public in an effort to bury the self-evident truth of the JFK assassination coup and its cover-up. In the debate, the national security state and its puppets (the military industrial complex and the nation’s press), desperately seek to substitute for the plain historical truth of their guilt, a seemingly impenetrable mystery which is no mystery at all.”

Ill Will: The Sixth Floor Museum

I got a flier in the mail from The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas the other day, alerting me to an event scheduled for the end of this month. The event is called “Conflicting Conclusions,” and the museum web site has more info. I’m not going to link to it.

That flier bills the event as “a riveting conversation between two key figures from” the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassination, the two main government-led probes into the assassination of JFK, which reached the titular, opposing conclusions.

It’s a crock of shit, of course.

I bear no ill will toward the Sixth Floor Museum. Or I bear a lot of ill will. I can’t seem to remember which.  

Oh yeah – it’s ill will, mostly; great gobs of it. Heaps of scorn. Total distrust.

Am I an ingrate? It is true I was once an invited speaker there, after the book that is the subject of this blog appeared. There I am, at left, in all my understated glory, blathering away.

But it is also true that the conspiracy that killed JFK succeeded, to the extent that it did, due to the promotion of confusion and mystery – aided and abetted by media sluts, and by institutions like The Sixth Floor Museum.

Shortly before the above photo was taken, some museum people sat me down with a big stack of my books and had me sign them all. You can’t return them once I ink ’em up, I cautioned. No probleemo, someone replied. Sign.

So I did. Supposedly Praise From a Future Generation is, or was, the sole pro-conspiracy (pardon the phrase) title in the museum bookstore. This little factoid, I think, made some people a little suspicious of me. Fuck ’em. I don’t know whether the museum still carries the book; probably not.

(Since I have never written it elsewhere, I’ll take a moment to note that among my Sixth Floor listeners was none other than Bob Jackson, who took the famous photo of Oswald being gutshot. Don’t know why he was there; he seemed totally underwhelmed.)

In any case, the Sixth Floor continues to promote confusion and mystery, and The Big Lie. I will never forget or overlook that simple fact.

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The late Gary Mack, erstwhile Sixth Floor Museum curator, once scolded me via email for a rather bland commentary I wrote about the museum, and posted to the Internet. I made that post in the late 1990s, about five years after writing it. The comments were copied out of an otherwise forgettable essay I wrote about visiting Dallas for the first time in 1993. 

And now, reminded of it all these years later, I will share here the remarks that irked Gary Mack. What the hell!

From “Impressions: The Sixth Floor Museum, circa 1993”

For someone who has no doubt there was a conspiracy to murder JFK, there is a lot to dislike about The Sixth Floor museum, where I went the day after the bus tour.

For starters, there is the fact that such a place is housed in the Book Depository, the cradle of the great lie. There is also the fact it is listed in the Dallas section of the AAA Tour Book for Texas, under the heading “What To See.” This gives The Sixth Floor the stamp of officialdom; the tour book states casually that it is “the site from which the shots that killed President Kennedy ... were fired.”

The once-cavernous sixth floor is now partitioned, and crammed with exhibits recreating the Kennedy Administration years, as well as the assassination. Like rats in a maze, visitors move from exhibit to exhibit, getting the official story. Many carry Walkman-style tape players, rented for an extra two bucks, which provide a canned narration of events.

It is difficult to view The Sixth Floor as anything other than a monument to the Warren Commission. The few references that are made to the idea of conspiracy – and admittedly, there are several – amount to little more than lip service to the notion; the scales remain heavily weighted against Lee Harvey Oswald.

There are no museum officials on hand to answer questions at The Sixth Floor. Visitors are not allowed to take photographs. Virtually nothing remains as it was on November 22 1963; even the so-called “sniper’s nest” in the building’s southeast corner window has been reconstructed.

Security is strangely tight at this museum, like security at an airport. All bags are either checked at the door or run through an X-ray machine. Visitors must step through a metal detector before entering. It is the sort of security one would associate with a live president – not a museum for a dead one.

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Photos by Marshall Kelin

The Debate Club

The following is the text of an op-ed I wrote for the "Debate Club," a feature of the US News and World Report web site. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination. The magazine asked me and four others to comment on the question, "Was JFK's Assassination a Conspiracy?"

Was JFK's Assassination a Conspiracy?

Only someone unfamiliar with the evidence would sincerely ask, “Was there a conspiracy to assassinate JFK?” It is easily demonstrable – no thanks to the media.

For all its virtues, the American media has been regrettably complacent, even hostile, in its treatment of both the assassination and independent research into that crime. And so the issue has a serious public relations problem; when researchers are acknowledged today it is usually derisive. “These people should be ridiculed, even shunned,” the New York Times Book Review sneered in 2007. “It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers.”

I beg to differ. Independent analysis of the official evidence by “these people” has clearly demonstrated the fact of conspiracy.

The present discussion sets aside the question of culpability; it is restricted to the evidence of Dealey Plaza, where the assassination took place. What that evidence shows is incontestable. As Vincent Salandria observed, “Dealey Plaza reeked of conspiracy.”

In its Report, the Warren Commission placed a gunman on the sixth floor of a building along JFK’s motorcade route through Dallas. Such a gunman would have been behind the presidential limousine when the shots were fired. Yet of the 121 Dealey Plaza witnesses whose statements appear in the Commission’s published evidence, fifty-one, by one count, said gunshots came from the right front – that is, from the infamous grassy knoll. Only 32 thought shots came from the building, while 38 had no opinion.

Former Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell, who rode in the ill-fated Dallas motorcade, said he heard two shots from the grassy knoll. He did not tell that to the Warren Commission, but later conceded, “I testified the way they wanted me to.”

The 8mm Zapruder film of the assassination unambiguously shows JFK’s head and upper body slammed back and to the left. Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus the bullet that destroyed JFK was fired from the right front – from the grassy knoll – far from the alleged location of the alleged assassin.

There is much more than this, of course: Dealey Plaza witnesses who saw unidentified armed men in the vicinity. Witnesses whose observations suggest a radio-coordinated hit team. Three Dallas cops who encountered fake Secret Service agents, and one who testified to meeting a hysterical woman screaming, “They’re shooting the president from the bushes!”

It all demonstrates conspiracy – the how of it. The question of culpability, the who and the why, remains; it is all that really matters. It is where the conversation begins. We should expect, even demand, that our media lead the way.

Conspiracy in JFK’s death is a fact. To debate the issue perpetuates the erroneous notion that there is something to debate.

Even after half a century the assassination is not irrelevant. Nor is it too late to act. An early critic named Maggie Field once said that finding the truth about the murder of JFK was of utmost importance. “Until we can get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination, this country is going to remain a sick country,” she said. “No matter what we do. Because we cannot live with that crime. We just can’t.”

E-book: Praise from a Future Generation

As of today – October 1, 2013 – my book Praise from a Future Generation is available as an e-book.

Praise from a Future Generation is a nonfiction account of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission and its report on the 1963 assassination of JFK.

The book first appeared as a hardcover in 2007, published by Wings Press of San Antonio, Texas. It has not exactly been a best seller – but then, I never expected it to be.

I must admit, this is a case of the shoe being on the other foot. On one of my other blogs I railed against e-books as something just shy of a crime against humanity.

Now, self-interest asserts itself.

This e-book version of Praise from a Future Generation has been a long time coming. Wings first approached me about this more than two years ago and I dutifully began yakking about it here. Then one delay led to another. But...that's all water under the bridge now.

You can find both the hardcover and the e-version on Amazon.