"The Devil is in the Details" Malcolm Blunt in conversation with Alan Dale.

I'm ashamed to admit that until a few short years ago ( when Barto began his careful excavations, methodically sifting through his vast archive and scanning the many gems he unearthed) I was only vaguely aware of the name Malcolm Blunt

Perhaps with the release of this excellent new book many more people will become familiar with his name and his work 

In an age of brash hucksterism , with so many so called research peacocks strutting and preening, flaunting their gaudy feathers whilst making all sorts of extravagant claims, Mr Blunt is that rarest of exceptions.

A man who lets his work speak for him

And the sheer quality of that work drowns out the lurid cacophony.

I'm only just now getting fully acquainted with the breadth and scale of his achievements; beside the archive, that apparently still contains many unplundered treasures, a glittering trove beyond even the late Mary Ferrell's most avaricious dreams, there was his work in the national archives and his own first hand research.
His interview with Pete Bagley for example is a masterpiece.
Nobly employing the methods so often abused , with his quiet respectful demeanour he was able to prise more out of the interviewee, far more perhaps than he ever intended revealing.

I don't have the privilege of knowing Mr Blunt, indeed i've never even had the pleasure of meeting him, but he seems to be a gentleman, in the very best sense of the word.
Diligent, respectful, meticulous, quite simply a natural born researcher and archivist.

Amongst the generous praise quite rightfully lavished on this work( from luminaries such as Robert Kennedy jnr, John Newman, David Talbot and our own troll punk supremo Greg Parker) Jim DiEugenio states plainly that Malcolm Blunt is the best researcher currently working in the JFK assassination field( What no Cory?)

I'd concur, albeit with a slight caveat( IMHO  Greg, Larry H and a couple of others are equally important)

I hope Barto doesn't mind me starting this thread( he and Malcolm are not only colleagues but friends and perhaps he wanted to start a thread dedicated to the book)
I started it with the best of intentions. To advertise his new book, an essential addition to any self respecting JFK assassination library ,but also to pay tribute to someone, a very rare someone, who is respected as an individual almost as much as he is respected as a researcher.

I ordered the book yesterday as soon as I saw the thread over on the Education Forum.

For once it actually lived up to its name!

Alan Dale appreciates your post Alex, and I am all cool with it.
The Archives will go public hopefully around Nov 2021.

Mention of Greg and ROKC in the book.

Thanks Barto.

If this case is ever going to fight it's way out of the tabloid netherworld, if it's ever going to be taken seriously by the people whom we need to take it seriously, we need selfless dedicated researchers like yourself and Mr Blunt. 

I know I always yammer on about it, but the procession of con artists, fake witnesses and hustlers have all but relegated this case to the fringes, suspending it some grotesque limbo...

 The prospect of seeing the supposed expert on the Secret Service schmoozing at Trine Day's JFK CON ( AGAIN) ...Roll up Roll up Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, experiencers and abductees...tune in your high frequency silicon microchip, put 100 bucks in the tin foil hat our seductive hostess is passing around...is enough to ensure a peptic ulcer...

This year you're all in for a special treat!!

Another witness!!!

After nearly 60 years someone has just remembered seeing a nondescript Caucasian male climbing up a staircase!!!

This is evidence of Armstrongian vintage!!

That's right Vince Palamara( whose always struck me as gullible, staggeringly devoid of insight, with the fragile narcissistic personality of a teenage ingenue...how the FUCK did he attain such a vaunted position? ) is once again headlining Judy CON...one of the warm-up acts is some woman who claims to have seen Lee in Judy's apartment...or some such shit..

How can anyone possibly be so gullible? 

I've seen, first hand, the  corrosive effect of 25 years plus of the " All the world is a Conspiracy and the footlights are full of disinfo agents" mentality , i've seen my wife's friends ( smart twentysomething university students/ recent graduates) roll their eyes distainfully whenever the case is mentioned...

Admittedly, some are interested enough to wade through all the ridiculous " everything is fake" bullshit to get to the actual, proveable facts, but most dismiss it , treating the subject with utter derision.

The lone nut brigade don't have to do a fucking thing... except for occasionally leaning out of the 6th Floor Window ... shouting down .

" The SBT was theoretically possible"

This case has been hijacked, turned from a serious historical enquiry into a cosy little sinecure on the " alternative media" circuit...

The " researchers" are cartoonish stereotypes of wild eyed foaming at the mouth Conspiracy Theorists....

It breaks my fucking heart....it really does.

As the case recedes further into the past, becoming ever more distant-, those black and white images becoming ever more the fading echo of a long vanished Atlantis, no realer than the hollow eyed survivors of Pickett's Charge,  photographed amidst the bodies of their slain comrades..( to put it in context we are as distant from the assassination as the assassination itself was distant from the 1906 Morocco Crisis... the age of European Colonialism, of Emperors and Kings, bewhiskered, bemedalled effigies who ruled over 90% of the Earth's surface)- it becomes increasingly difficult for the millennial to feel any sort of human connection with those distant flickering images ..

If they think of JFK at all they think of the dude who banged Marilyn Monroe before being killed by the illuminati before he could spill the beans on the Alien Presence...

It's either that or the straight skeptical line...it was LHO...a misanthropic sociopath...a little commie runt who just got lucky...

If the stone is ever going to be rolled back up the Grassy Knoll...if the truth ( and not some nebulous necrotic indefinable metaphysical truth but the simple truth) is ever going to emerge, butterfly like, from the cocoon of lies then it'll be down to the efforts of Malcolm Blunt, Larry H, Greg, Barto, ROKC and others..

You guys have been in the trenches for years, you've done the hard sometimes unglamorous work, you deserve the credit.

Along with Greg ( and others) work demystifying Oswald, cutting through the decades of mythologising, the work Barto has done, sifting through the treasure trove Malcolm Blunt carefully accumulated,  unearthing those hidden gems as well as making the archive itself accessible, has been the most important development of the century.

That one line " Then went out to watch the P Parade" was without doubt one of the most important discoveries.

In a world where the average attention span is measured by the millisecond, You Tube clips rattling through ritalin deadened minds like peanut M and Ms, I genuinely believe that the Prayerman clip represents the last best chance of breaking through the wall of apathy.
The chance to make a breach in the Castle wall....

Just as the Zapruder film did.....but instead of splintering into cults and cliques...frittering  away precious time arguing about 8 foot women and trying to work out how many Jews can fit into the boot of a Lincoln continental.... there's whole regiments of supporting evidence ready for the command, waiting to pour through the breach, bayonets glittering, like the Utah sunlight through a lense....

Thanks again Barto, and please give both Messrs Dale and Blunt my profoundest thanks.

I looked at the TOC on AMZ and it looks pretty thin. It looks like it's just more of the same that Newman (who's involved with this new one) has already covered in his books.

The only genuinely new thing that could ever happen in this case is if either the man in the vestibule is proven without a doubt that it's Oswald up there; or if some future POTUS gets up and announces a wholesale change in the case. In the meantime, we're left with people regurgitating the same old thing over and over again and trying to make a buck off of it. All of the people Blunt acknowledges in his book are professional (wink-wink = paid) authors except for Bill Simpich, who did a great job with his series on the Ferrell website.

Whew! I never ONCE lumped you in with these other people, Greg. I mean, why do you think I come here? I come here to learn as much as I can about the case because I know you tend to take a jaundiced eye about a lot of the stupid shit regarding this case, as well as try to keep it real. And, too, because IMO your site is spot on as I don't think Oswald was up on the 6th floor at 12:30 pm on 11/22/63.

So you spent a lot of money to try to make money? I've been there, too, Greg. I ran an event video business for 7 years 20 years ago with a modicum of success. And then I tried spending profits from it and branching out to folks putting their wedding videos on a second site to share with others. Now where have you heard of that concept today, 20 years on:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010223232338/http://www.weddingvideoworld.com/

Nothing came of it but not for lack of trying. You tried something, I tried something, others have as well. And I did all of this while being deaf. If you think that's nothing, then try stuffing the thickest wads of cotton in your ears for a day, a week, a month and living your life, and watch how your entire world changes. Anyway, sometimes things work out and sometimes they don't. I don't know what else to say about that.

There's no chip here, Greg. The case has been churned a million times and you of all people should know that what I said about it earlier - that nothing is really going to come of it because it's deeply buried - is sadly the truth. Yes, I posted stuff on Ed Forum and have been banned there for over a year. I post occasionally on Duncan's site, but why bother when folks there don't even want to open their mind up and at least try to give a reasoned reply?

If Bill S gave you credit for your work, great. If he didn't, I'm sorry he didn't. All I know is that State Secret sounds, at least to me, like a very plausible narrative because 57 years on, Oswald was not just some random Joe Schmo that they've always painted him out to be.

" ALL the people Blunt acknowledges"...

That sounds like a pretty definitive statement to me. 

Especially when Vinny had just posted Malcolm referencing Greg and ROKC

You must possess some preternatural, almost psychic ability to be able to fully divine the contents of a book, merely by scanning the TOC..

Borges has nothing on you !

I agree with you to a certain extent; the vast majority of assassination books are either tepid regurgitations of the orthodox Conspiracy narrative or starry eyed romps through  fantastical make believe kingdoms.....where elfin featured teenage Mata Haris skip past the hookah smoking caterpillars and Cheshire cats hand in hand with their meat headed all American secret agent beaus...

If we were to follow your advice, if we were to throw up our hands and wait for some miraculous intervention, or some enlightened politician to suddenly reverse nearly 60 years of institutionalised deceit and obfuscation we'd be surrendering the field to the hustlers and the fake witnesses...

Even in the wild and wacky domain of the troofers nature abhors a vacuum..

These days itsi almost as important to expose the lies as it is to reveal the truth....

I've read State Secret a couple of times, as well as Simpich's other work and with the greatest respect iveI come away only marginally impressed.

His work on the Mexico city cable traffic, the AMOTs and the Tarasoffs was the most impressive part.
However, when he moves from micro analysis and begins surveying the wider historical picture, the quality of his work rapidly declines...

A mole hunt may well help explain the 1960 Lee HENRY Oswald documents, apparently Oswald's files were segregated from the central registry. But to speculate that the whole Mexico city charade was part of some molehunt seems highly dubious.

My main issue with his work is how he handles the Soviet angle and Oswald's linguistic abilities.
To be frank  it's quite apparent he hasn't the vaguest notion of the socio political climate of the Soviet Union in the late 50s/ early 60s. Like most he treats the Soviet Union as some faceless monolithic edifice. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. The fissures that ran through the upper echelons of the nomenklatura were every bit as deep as those that divided the Washington/ Pentagon.

His treatment of the Marina/ Webster affair was almost laughably jejune.

Worse than that he's contributed to the mythology that surrounds Oswald's Russian ability.
This should have been a non issue, any halfway competent Russian language scholar, listening to the one and only Lee Harvey Oswalds spoken English could have told right away he was a native English speaker.
ItsI blatantly obvious.

Apart from Greg and the folk here the only person who understood that was ol'Tovarisch Tom Graves.


If you think I'm mistaken Mr Case then I'll start another thread on Simpich's work. I'll be happy to go into detail. 
Since you've made your opinion of me quite clear, chiding my lack of knowledge and patronising me, advising me to " study" it should be easy for polymath like you to prove me wrong.

" There are more boxes than ones to play in..."

Larry Trotter himself couldn't have put it better!
In fact that's the best line I've read since  Sandy, the potwalloping peasants exhortation in Lee HENRY V..." Once more into the fake Marguerite's breach .."

Lance Payette another very busy lawyer from Arizona who couldn't hack it on the Education Forum now has found his courage to leave a rather poor review of the book. The main issue of Blunt's work completely eludes him and also @JFK_Case  both of you must do better.

The book is a recap of conversations about the research done at that time. Research that has been used by the many authors whose books you read.
It's as simple as that.

The 20 odd years before that are barely touched in it.
I have had the privilege to go through a very large assortment of his work.

TBC...................

Lance Payette's arrogance is breathtaking.

" There are none so blind as those who spend their time boasting about how far they can see"
( 2nd Kudlaty Verse 2 Chapter 3. Incidentally Verse 3 is the wondrous tale of the bilocating Hungarian...who was magically operated on in a hospital...a whole decade before the hospital was built!!! )

Like all fundamentalists Lance spends his time excoriating others , for the faults he's too blind or hypocritical to recognise in himself...

The LN/ CT divide is utterly spurious....an imaginary  fault line created by ( and for) unimaginative people...

There are people who follow the facts wherever the facts happen to lead, people intellectually honest enough to admit when they've taken a wrong turn... and we all have.
Having the honesty to admit your own mistakes is part of growing up. That's why so many troofers and their ideological confreres manage to sound like surly teenagers...

Then there's those who only see as much as they want to...then look no further.

I've never taken Lance seriously. I don't think he believes half of what he writes. He sounds like he's trying to convince himself.

Nah, he is just an opinionated time waster....

Bill Kelly has reviewed the book.


http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-devils-in-details-review.html

Exactly Greg. Why else would he mention Prayer Man in a non related context?

PM isn't politically correct.

Jake_Sykes wrote:PM isn't politically correct.

 Indeed. Many so called researchers just want PM to go away.

greg_parker wrote:

Vinny wrote:Bill Kelly has reviewed the book.


http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-devils-in-details-review.html

Another echo of the long past who has Prayer Man Tourette's Syndrome.

Tell me about it.

Vinny wrote:Bill Kelly has reviewed the book.


http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-devils-in-details-review.html

What a terrible review, it does not do Malcolm's work any justice. It just feels like Bill Kelley has only read the covers and the first 10 pages.
On top of that, that dinosaur has misspelt my name. He has done me a favor as I feel no inclination to be connected to that dreadful review.

Jim has reviewed the book.

https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/the-devil-is-in-the-details-by-malcolm-blunt-with-alan-dale