…Robert Roper’s “Nabokov in America.” Roper, a novelist, non-fiction writer — and friend — is a great admirer of Nabokov’s (a secret he had kept from me for over 40 years). The merging of Bud’s talents as a writer (which I did know of) and his passion has produced a work enjoyable and informative from start to finish. I learned about Nabokov, his wife, their son. I learned about Nabokov’s friends and feuds, the butterflies he caught and the crafting of his career. I learned about the family’s cross-country trips, the America they prowled and the motor courts in which they rested and how this profited “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” and more.
Whodunnit ix: Talbot
Talbot is less precise than Douglass.
In fact, precision in terms of identifying who killed Kennedy and why, is not something Talbot, a former editor at Mother Jones and the founder of Salon.com, is about. His point seems to be that, despite investigations by the Warren Commission and two subsequent congressional committees, too much doubt exists about what happened in Dallas for it to be left to lie. He cites some commission members and investigators, as well as other congressmen, members of the Kennedy family, Kennedy loyalists, prominent mainstream journalists, and ex-CIA personnel, who either remain skeptical of or directly repudiate the Warren conclusions. He notes that polls have steadfastly shown a majority of the public – 61% in 2013, down from a high of 81%, most recently attained in 2001 – doubt Oswald acted alone. (Personally, I don’t find this surprising. I doubt many Americans have read even the one-volume summary, let alone the commission’s complete 27 volume report (I haven’t) or Bugliosi’s 1600 pages. And while Talbot faults the media for not having aggressively investigated the assassination, it has, for 50 years, faithfully reported on the many books, TV shows and films that have criticized the commission and thereby educated the public to believe it failed.)
Without committing himself to a particular theory, Talbot identifies as possible Kennedy killers the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, the Pentagon, the CIA, “rogue” CIA agents, and “a national security cabal,” The most original theory he recounts, set forth in notes for a never-written novel by David Atlee Phillips, an ex-CIA agent who figures in several of these plots. In these notes an alliance of Soviet agents and CIA-hating American leftists co-opt a CIA operation, which had established Oswald’s Marxist credentials in order to get him into Cuba where he would assassinate Castro, and use Oswald instead to kill Kennedy in Dallas in an effort to destroy the CIA. (Talbot admits he can’t tell if this amounts to a “confession” by Phillips or an effort to spread further “disinformation.”)
Talbot ends Brothers by calling for the release of documents never released by the CIA, the Kennedys, Cuba, and Moscow, so yet another formal investigation can take place. I wouldn’t mind seeing more documents, but I don’t share Talbot’s faith that they would yield more light than they would blow further smoke. In either event, I’m not sure what they would accomplish either. Since Warren, Americans have learned truths about Watergate, Vietnam and Iraq, without experiencing any enlightenment I am able to discern.
But anyway, onto the evidence.
Whodunnit viii: Douglass (cont.)
What accounts for Douglass’s choices? Did he find the stories too delicious to resist? (Oliver Stone apparently did, utilizing another of Cherabie’s multiple versions – that she was thrown from a car, not a bar – to open JFK.) Was Douglass unconsciously motivated by doubt or fear or guilt to sabotage his own credibility? Does he have such faith in the strength of his convictions to believe they can carry the weight of such dubious tales? I know some among the conspiratorially minded who believe that the reason there are so many different conspiracy theories afloat is that the CIA has been sponsoring them in order to discredit by association the one true theory, which is whichever it is in which the CIA-accuser believes. I would not be surprised to read someday that Douglass was a CIA agent employed to undermine the truth of the National-Security-State-as-assassins theory by associating it with the doubt-inducing accounts of Cherabie and Vinson.
But I don’t dismiss Douglass.
Unspeakable is sincere and well-intentioned. It is the best-written of the four books I set out for consideration and better written than any of the other similarly themed books or articles to which my perambulations took me. Douglass, a 78-year-old non-violence activist and theologian, is a devotee of Thomas Merton, whose thinking gives his book a compelling spiritual dimension. (Merton, incidentally, along with Allen Ginsberg and Bertrand Russell, was among the “prominent personalities” mentioned by Talbot, who responded to a 1966 survey as doubting the Warren Commission’s findings. Dwight MacDonald and Norman Thomas sided with those who supported them.)
Douglass’s book is also, at least partially, persuasive. Coming from a family of Stevensonian Democrats and, in the early 1960s, more focused on civil rights than foreign affairs, (in which, I confess, I considered the United States a force of “good”), I regarded JFK as a foot-dragger, uncommitted to the progressive cause. And Douglass goes a long way toward convincing me that Kennedy is to be respected and commended for his efforts to move the country and the world toward peace.
But that doesn’t absolve the rest of Douglass’s case from analysis.
Whodunnit vii: choice of characters (b)
Or take Robert G. Vinson.
Again, if you were writing a book – thriller or history – given all the information at your disposal, would you include an account of the escape of one of several men who had impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald in order to frame him for the assassination of President Kennedy which utilized a cargo plane landing in mid-afternoon on a road under construction outside Dallas? And instead of having a plane ready and waiting, would you instead divert one already in flight from Washington, D.C. to Denver? And would you have aboard as its only passenger a serviceman (Vinson) returning home from an interview about a promotion he desired, which, coincidentally, had been interrupted by the officer conducting it to engage in a phone conversation, in which the serviceman had overheard the officer urge someone not to let the president go to Dallas? Would you then deliver the serviceman and the imposter to an air force base in Roswell, New Mexico, where you maintained the secrecy of your extraction only by restricting the serviceman to the base for two hours before letting him return home? Would you then ensure his remaining silent by having him sign a confidentiality agreement while he worked at a hidden CIA base at which took place the development of “flying saucer”-like aircraft? And would you have him maintain this silence for 30 years until a lawyer convinced him it no longer applied, at which point they co-authored a book (Flight From Dallas)?
Would it not have bothered you in your plotting, as it did the conspiracy skeptic John McAdams (JFK Assassination Logic), that not one person in the Dallas area reported seeing the cargo plane land or take-off, or that, given other events you had previously described, it had taken three hours and four different vehicles for your impostor to travel the four or five miles to the landing strip where he rendezvoused with the plane, whereas, if he had jumped in a van, he would already have been halfway to Roswell?
David Talbot omitted Robert Vines’s story. James Douglass gave him five pages.
Whodunit vi: choice of characters (a)
Yesterday I mentioned that, given all the information that exists about the Kennedy assassination, writing a book about it is almost like writing a novel. With that in mind as a premise…
Would you have your three-person team of CIA-contracted assassins include a woman who was a heroin addict? Then while driving from Miami to Dallas, would you have one of the men with whom she was traveling throw her out of a bar, leaving her to wander until hit by a car, so that the police would take her to a hospital for the withdrawal symptoms she was experiencing and, en route, have her explain that the purpose of her trip had been to a) get some money; b) pick-up her baby; c) kill the president; d) proceed to Houston to purchase 10 kilos of heroin from a seaman arriving from Galveston; and e) go to Mexico? A few days later would you have her volunteer that she had worked for Jack Ruby as a stripper and knew he and Lee Harvey Oswald had been engaged in a long-standing homosexual relationship? Finally, having failed to eliminate her before she’d made any of these statements, would you, two years later, have her shot in the head but convince the coroner to attribute the cause of death to a motor vehicle accident?
I didn’t think so.
David Talbot omitted this woman, usually known as Rose Cheramie, from his book. James W. Douglass gave her two pages. He admitted there was a question as to “how reliable” Cheramie was but satisfied himself because the police had confirmed that the ship she’d mentioned had docked in Galveston; the seaman was aboard; and the man supposedly holding the money and her baby was a suspected drug trafficker. For Douglas this outweighed, that, according to Vincent Bugliosi, “Cheramie” was but one of the woman’s two dozen aliases; that she had been arrested more than four-dozen time; and that she had been hospitalized three times for mental problems. Douglass does not mention that there is no record of Ruby ever having owned the club at which she says worked, nor that, within the few days following her first being picked up by the police, she also said that she alone was going to kill the president; that it was the others, but not she, who would; and that it was not any of them but different people entirely, which struck my wife, a former psychotherapist – and someone who believes Oswald didn’t act alone – as the type the mentally ill often make to themselves – or others, as long as they are willing to put up with their ramblings.
Whodunnit v: Introductory theory
So many people have testified, given statements, and written books about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that someone writing another almost finds himself, like a novelist, with everything within the limits of his imagination to draw from. For such an author, the plot he elects to track and the characters with which he carries it to fullness will not only shape how readers will regard his work but reveal something about his thought processes and motivations in writing it.
Some books with the germ of an idea, an observation, an area of inquiry and develop as research and thought takes them. In others the course is set in advance, and the only details that are applied are those which fit the route which has already been mapped out.
Some of these choices make a work compelling.
Others throw it out of whack.
So with that in mind, stay tuned.
Whodunnit iv (Early Critical Reaction)
Whatever else this project may lead to, it certainly has been good for my blogging productivity.
Robert said, after I had explained what I was up to, “It would be more interesting if you explained why a 73-year-old man would investigate a 52-year-old murder, when the investigation already seems to have been completed by someone else.” Adele said, “I agree with Robert. If only M would talk to the 73-year-old, if wouldn’t be chasing this wild-but-already-bagged goose.”
I was the 73-year-old. Vincent Bugliosi was the “someone else.” And my friend M won’t discuss his belief that the national security state killed Kennedy because to do so is to accept that there is something to discuss, which is to make one’s self complicit with the cover-up of what happened in Dallas in 1963.
I don’t disagree with Robert. I have often said why someone writes about something can be more interesting than what they wrote about. I also don’t disagree with Robert that it would be interesting to explore why people believe what they do about the assassination, except, I told him, I think I already know that. I once told M that I resisted believing in believing in conspiracies involving high government officials and multiple government agencies because it would make me uncomfortable to believe I lived in a world like that. He hit me over the head with that admission for several years, until I said I had also come to believe that people believed in conspiracies because it made them uncomfortable to live in world where a lone, loony misfit, like Oswald, could kill a figure they revered, like Kennedy. They were uncomfortable with the chaotic, unpredictable randomness of the universe this suggested so they sought assurance this was not so by believing in conspiracies like others sought assurance by believing in religion.
M said, No. He believed what he did because it was the Truth.
Which only strengthened my belief in what I had just said.
Whodunnit iii (Alteration/correction)
I’m thinking of dumping Posner. Skimming Bugliosi shows he’s fairly dismissive of it, accusing it of misquotes and factual distortions. Since they reach the same conclusion, and B’s book is much more extensive, I may save myself reading 600+ pages. Also it turns out I do have B’s CD-rom, with its 1000+ footnotes. It was tucked inside the front cover, not the back, where I’d expected it.
I just finished…
…Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” vol. 1.
Triggered by an article by him in the NYTimes Sunday mag and cashed in a credit we had at Amazon for the first three. But after 20 pp., she placed in on a stack of to-be-returned-to’s of hers, which stands several years deep.
I retrieved it from there. Adhering to my policy of not reading reviews of contemporary novels in order to avoid unwarranted hype, I knew little about it. But I had gleaned it was considered a major work; plus I had nothing else going; plus, like those mountains, it was there.
It is deceptively simple. Lableled a novel, it presents as autobiography. The suggestion is so powerful that it overrides the impossibility he could recall with such exactitude all that he has set down. The conversations; the details of rooms; the lighting. (There is a lot of recalled lighting. I can’t recall last week’s.) And aside from the subject matter resonating as autobiographical, there is a shaping that runs counter to a novel’s. The author if a novel, it seemed to me, wouldn’t have included much of what Knausgaard did. But it all worked, puzzlement included. Only five more volumes to go.
One other thing, there is a lot in the book about death. It begins with passages on death. It ends with them. Idea-wise, death seems the major thing. Knausgaard was 40 when he wrote this book, and if you are 40 or 50 or 20-something reading it, you might think, Oh, wow, heavy. But if you are 73 and have been coded twice yourself, you may find yourself thinking that his thoughts are not as interesting as all that. They carry about the same (or less) weight than the lighting. That is no reason not to read it though. The stuff on relationships, friends, girls, brothers, fathers, is high quality.
Whodunnit (ii): the murder of JFK
Thanks to a libris, I now have the four books I mentioned last blog. So let me provides some vital statistics. (All weights include index and footnotes, except for the Bugliosi which has its fns in a CD rom I didn’t get.)
In the black (pro-Warren) corner, Posner’s volume (1993), the veteran of the bunch, weighs in at 637 pp. His partner, the massive — think Andre the Giant — Bugliosi (2007) has 1632. In the white (anti-Warren) corner, the Talbot (2007) is a slim 417 pp, and the Douglas is a nearly as trim 510.
Before joining me in standing while Marilyn Monroe sings the national anthem, let me make a few observations. Posner, being published first can address none of the other books. Reviewing the other indexes though, I see Bugliosi mentions Posner several times, not generally complimentarily, but neither of his opponents, perhaps understandably since their publication dates were close to his. Talbot mentions Posner but not to rebut any points he made. Talbot says that Posner’s book became a best seller because it was favorably reviewed by the mainstream media since its conclusion let the same media “off the hook” for its complicity in the cover-up. (Any implications of his own book becoming a “bestseller,” as its softcover edition proclaims, are not drawn.) Douglas mentions neither Posner nor Bugliosi. The failure of Talbot and Douglas may be due to the fact to the close proximity of the publication dates of their books, but Bugliosi’s book stemmed from his having prosecuted Oswald in a 21-hour British television trial, broadcast over several days in several countries, in July 1986. (A condensed American version was shown on SHOW in November.) Gerry Spence was the defense attorney. The jury convicted Oswald, after six hours deliberation. This would seem to have warranted some mention.
Maybe it did in some later writings by Douglas and Talbot. I haven’t checked, but I am aware of an article in Talbot in “Slate” (11/6/13) where he places Douglas’s book atop a list of the seven “best books” about Kennedy’s killing. (His own is Number Six.) Neither Posner nor Bugliosi made the list but are dismissed as “hardcore lone gunmen” theorists.
I ought to say I am no impartial referee. I believed Oswald did it up until around the time of Oliver Stone’s movie on the subject. (Like most Americans, I had read none of the books on the subject.) Then I conceded it was as likely as not that other people were involved. Since then I have swung back to my original opinion.