JFK Lancer conference

http://www.jfklancer.com/Dallas2013/speakers.html#Kaiser

It looks like Scott Kaiser's presentation is going to be very interesting. I've read on the DPF that Jim Di will be making the same speech on President Kennedy's foreign policy which he did at the Wecht conference, so that should be really good.

I only wish I could have been there this year.

I'm curious to know who among our members may be able to attend.

This will be my first.

Jim DiEugenio is giving two talks.  I'll be there for the entire shebang, Wednesday eve to Sunday late afternoon.

Hasan Yusuf wrote:http://www.jfklancer.com/Dallas2013/speakers.html#Kaiser

It looks like Scott Kaiser's presentation is going to be very interesting. I've read on the DPF that Jim Di will be making the same speech on President Kennedy's foreign policy which he did at the Wecht conference, so that should be really good.

I only wish I could have been there this year.

Entertaining? Possibly. Very interesting? Highly doubtful. My own experiences with Scott convince me he is in dire need of a ghost writer and a ghost presenter. A fan does not a researcher or author/journalist make.
He exhibits the emotional involvement of Peter Janney in his subject matter without the means to grasp the detail and background to ask the people he has access to the questions a skilled and up to speed interviewer would ask. He has access because they knew his father. For Scott, the most compelling (and distracting) thing about his interview subjects is that they knew his father. He shows great affinity and admiration for interview subjects who should be approached in a probing, adversarial way, as necessary. I predict he will advocate for them. The people he has access to will not sit for questions from an unemotional interviewer with the background to know what to ask and evaluate responses and build on them to test for inconsistencies.

Tom Scully wrote:Entertaining? Possibly. Very interesting? Highly doubtful. My own experiences with Scott convince me he is in dire need of a ghost writer and a ghost presenter. A fan does not a researcher or author/journalist make.
He exhibits the emotional involvement of Peter Janney in his subject matter without the means to grasp the detail and background to ask the people he has access to the questions a skilled and up to speed interviewer would ask. He has access because they knew his father. For Scott, the most compelling (and distracting) thing about his interview subjects is that they knew his father. He shows great affinity and admiration for interview subjects who should be approached in a probing, adversarial way, as necessary. I predict he will advocate for them. The people he has access to will not sit for questions from an unemotional interviewer with the background to know what to ask and evaluate responses and build on them to test for inconsistencies.

Based on his Ed forum posts, I tend to agree with you. In any event, I look forward to any feedback Albert, Jim Di, and other members of the forum who attend the conference can provide us.

I will be paying particular attention to the emergent "alternate" interpretations of Mexico City (I will try to temper my scepticism and give them a fair hearing).

Could we please have some feedback from the members who attended the Lancer conference about how it was?

Hasan,

This is a purely personal opinion, but overall I thought the Wecht conference was better.

Let's start with logistics.  The two largest programming errors that were made were to run parallel focus-group sessions on very similar topics; even though I think the whole idea of parallel sessions both a predictable concession to allowing lots of people to present and a regrettable consequence thereof, at least one can try not to create clashes of that sort.  The other problem was that the parallel sessions were held in a ballroom which was sectioned off by nothing more than heavy curtains, so there was considerable cross-talk noise which was annoying and at times it was impossible to concentrate on what was being said.

As for substance, and this again is a personal view, I also thought overall that it was not as spectacular.  Some of the speakers brought material they gave in Pittsburgh, e.g., Don Thomas, Tink Thompson, and Joan Mellen; and even Jim was asked to regive his Foreign Policy talk; but as a second talk he also performed a revealing autopsy on the HSCA.  Several people came up to Jim (I was present) to tell him that his two talks were among the best over the four days.

Pat Speer gave an incisive analysis of how the story of the "neck" wound can be traced through WC documents which to some extent shows that the verbal plastic surgery practiced by Gerald Ford did not occur in a vacuum, but had a lengthy pedigree of instances where the wound was referred to as being in the neck, much to the contrary of the evidence the Commission had before them.  William Law managed to convince Jim Jenkins to come and describe his recollections. I found this to be one of my personal highlights (I am always grateful to hear first-hand witnesses, especially one such as Jenkins, who is quite reluctant to talk).  There were other medical discussions -- Dave Mantik did a focus group which unfortunately was the victim of this cross-talk phenomenon and poor planning with AV equipement. If you have read Law's book, the ARRB testimony and Mantik's articles, there was nothing essentially new in this.  What was interesting at the discussion was the exchange about the placement of the fragments in the lateral X-ray (and Sherry Fiester's discussion with Mantik).  I tried to get Sherry to answer a very simple question, about whether the stellar formation she was talking about was supported by the X-ray, but she seemed reluctant to pronounce on the X-rays and instead launched into a resume of the empirical basis for her claims (which is there in the book too).  I should have followed up by asking the same thing of Mantik, who was saying that the line of fragments we see at the top was fairly linear.  I did catch him afterwards and he said that with a higher resolution image one can also see some additional patterning which would support what Sherry was saying.  Another person talked on the medical evidence (Russell Kent), but I missed that one.  While Gary Aguilar was there on Saturday morning, he did not speak at Lancer, but at COPA.  Rollie Zavada presented on the Z film (I missed it; however, I met him and got to ask him a few questions during lunch when Jim invited me to join them).  As in the case of the medico-legal evidence, there was both a focus group and lecture devoted to him.

There were also other well-known narratives presented:  Dick Russell spoke about Nagell, Barry Ernest presented the material on Adams and Styles.  Stuart Wexler talked about a couple of really peculiar and hard to evaluate leads in the Garrison case having to do with (dis)information given Harold Weisberg by a certain Dione Turner about Godfrey Kirkpatrick and Philip Geraci.  Other Garrison stuff was presented by Ed Tatro, but I only heard the first part of his focus group because I wanted to attend another one on Oswald being conducted by Bill Simpich.

I tried to follow Bill's presentations/discussions over the course of the first two days.  Bill is an affable and very knowledgeable fellow, and I like him.  I just have questions and reservations about his analysis, especially of Mexico City.  But I won't go into this now, as I need to do a lot more homework.  I hope perhaps in the near future to offer a (critical) reply to the national-security-blackmail scenario he seems to be proposing as a solution to the crime and cover-up.

I also heard both Rex Bradford and Jim Marrs (the latter got a standing ovation, obviously as a home-town favorite).  Rex's talk just tried to trace out the developing cover-up over the course of the first week; he played a couple of snippets from the LBJ tapes.  He didn't propose a strong thesis about all of this, though he seemed to imply that a solution to part of the mystery lies in understanding what motivated RFK's question (did "your guys do it", which Rex claims means "did our guys"; I'm sure Dan's hair will stand up on end here ...).  Pam McElwain-Brown gave her history of the limo 100X.  There were a number of other talks I missed.

In general, there were no "revelations" for me.  A number of solid talks, a number not-so-solid, but a lot of familiar material.  I think the reason here is that Lancer is also aimed at a more general public; I'm sure much of the audience had never heard a good bit of this.  The audience seemed to want to participate, there were always lots of questions, it seemed to me, and on a couple of occasions even wanted to buck the moderators by insisting the speakers continue beyond their allotted time (most notably with Jim Jenkins, who was asked to come back at 9:30 pm for a special discussion section).

Oh, let me also add that I did not attend, but came in late, to Brian Litman's talk (the KGB on Oswald).  I think the audience behaved for the most part (there was one heckler) civilly with him.  But Dave Mantik's question was precious.  He asked him to name his two favorite books on the assassination.  After hemming and hawing around by saying Dick Russell's book was good even though he didn't agree with it, he basically said that the best books on the case were Posner and Bugliosi. 

Shall I end there?

This was the first time in Dallas, so I went to Dealey Plaza on three separate occasions.  The ceremony on 11/22 was awful, as was to be expected, but even more pathetic was the aftermath (which I am sure the city planners and elite were quite happy about, and perhaps one could argue, knew would be a direct consequence of their actions).  When the barricades were opened, the Plaza was basically a desultory mess of people, police, snake-oil salesmen telling bystanders about the knoll and student protesters against police brutality (what did that have to do with 11/22/63 ? Oswald's arrest?).  Alex Jones' mob of creeps dominated Founders' Plaza (a block away from Dealey, site of the Kennedy "memorial", a god-awful piece of neofascist architecture which reminds me of the enclosures used for garbage dumpsters outside of apartment complexes; all it takes is to look at that horrendous monstrosity to know what Dallas thinks of JFK).  John Judge's moment of silence never came off, as far as I know.  To top it off, we had freezing rain during that whole period.

Addendum:  Aside from Russ Baker's talk about the putatively ubiquitous Bush connections to the assassination, the Texas angle was not really featured as much as I expected (which IMHO is a positive thing).  There was also a filmed interview with Abraham Bolden which I missed, but after speaking with others, there was nothing essential in it which was not in his book.  There was also a filmed interview with Ted Sorenson which was relatively interesting, though as is known, he refused to discuss the assassination per se.

^ Great synopsis, Albert. Thank you for the feedback and for attending.

I was glad I came, Alan.  I should have also mentioned, though, that I am sure the conference preparation was a tremendous amount of work, and that Debra's dedication despite, from what I understand, many personal obstacles, is really what allowed it all to happen.

Albert Rossi wrote:I was glad I came, Alan.  I should have also mentioned, though, that I am sure the conference preparation was a tremendous amount of work, and that Debra's dedication despite, from what I understand, many personal obstacles, is really what allowed it all to happen.

^ Thank you, Albert. Yes, that's certainly true. There was also a bit of the inevitable damage control of the least apparent kind in response to some unexpected issues. Nothing too bad. We felt pretty good about most of it.

One of the more astonishing moments among my personal experiences came immediately after leaving the podium on our first day. Within 10 seconds of concluding my opening remarks welcoming our attendees, kicking off our conference, my phone rang.

It was Dr. John Newman with news that he has participated in producing a Rap video on youtube.




And then there was the point during our banquet when Beverly Oliver danced the Twist with Jim Marrs.

Thanks again for attending.

Thank you for all the feedback, Albert.

P.S. Just to clarify a bit about what I meant re Mexico City. My questions arise with whether the (telephonic) impersonation of O is so clearly separable from the other activities attributed to him there, and ultimately who was behind it. To put it another way: who really manipulated the national security cover-up? But as I said, I will be revisiting closely this material and hope to have something more precise to say about it in the upcoming weeks.

There was a new piece of info with Jenkins I think.

He said he helped prepare the original face sheet, which is not the same as the one in evidence today.  It is in his handwriting and it has a back view and front view on either side. The one in evidence today has both views on one side.

He said he never saw it again after that night.  But, years later, Andy Purdy had it  with him during his HSCA interview.

As time goes on, Andy Purdy looks worse and worse.  Gary Aguilar thinks it was him who wrote the lie into the HSCA report about the Parkland doctors seeing a hole in the rear of Kennedy's head but the Bethesda personnel somehow did not.  Which was bullshit.

This is why I showed Purdy's picture during my presentation.  A pretty dirty guy.

Oh, yeah, Jim, I nearly forgot the face sheet ... thanks for calling it back to attention.  Crucial bit of info, kind of got lost in the duffle bag I've been carrying in my head.

Let me also add, now that I'm thinking of it, that in addition to noting the handwriting and the back-front views on a single page, Jenkins commented on the strangeness of the face sheet in evidence in the sense that

1.  It was not Navy protocol to black out entries (to correct them, you draw a line through it and initial it)
2.  The sheet was unsigned by the autopsy doctors
3.  But it did bear a signature on the bottom left by Admiral Burkley ("verified by?").

On some copies, is not Burkley's name erased?

I think he said that.

One other thing I should say here.  Whatever one's larger assessment of his work, I think Doug Horne is correct in pointing out that the ARRB (i.e., Jeremy Gunn) really should have deposed O'Connor and Jenkins, if only in order to clarify their HSCA testimony.

James DiEugenio wrote:There was a new piece of info with Jenkins I think.

He said he helped prepare the original face sheet, which is not the same as the one in evidence today.  It is in his handwriting and it has a back view and front view on either side. The one in evidence today has both views on one side.

He said he never saw it again after that night.  But, years later, Andy Purdy had it  with him during his HSCA interview.

As time goes on, Andy Purdy looks worse and worse.  Gary Aguilar thinks it was him who wrote the lie into the HSCA report about the Parkland doctors seeing a hole in the rear of Kennedy's head but the Bethesda personnel somehow did not.  Which was bullshit.

This is why I showed Purdy's picture during my presentation.  A pretty dirty guy.

I've been looking back over Jenkins' testimony and what he told Lifton, Livingstone and Law.  This picture of dirty Purdy is confirmed by what Jenkins related all the way back in Best Evidence:  that after his HSCA testimony, Purdy and Kelly took him over to the Archives** to show him the Rydberg drawings and basically badgered him concerning his placement of the head and back wounds.

**The Law Library of Dept. of Justice

In the HSCA interview report on Jenkins, the claim about the face sheet is already there, if only implicitly.

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/ARRB-MD-65-Jenkins-Purdy-HSCA-Interview-8-29-77-pic_32.htm

"He said he was normally in charge of most of the paperwork including the body description which consisted of filling in a free-printed sheet which had the body diagrams (he said the front on one side and the back on the other) and blanks for the weights and other notations."

You have to read between the lines, but this corroborates what he said this week.  From 1977.  Was he referring directly here to the face sheet he said Purdy had (not in the record) when he made this statement?

Wait!  there's more.  This is beginning to sound familiar now.

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0006-pic_33.htm
https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0007-pic_34.htm

All his claims are there.  The deviousness of the report is to leave his statement unexplained that "five or six years later he saw a publication" which the asterisk with "it might have been Time or Newsweek" with a version of the face sheet he did not recognize.  What else could it have been but the one printed in the WC documents?

Wow.


OK, the plot thickens.  They took him to the Law Library (I misremembered at NARA) to interrogate him over the face sheet.  There is a lot more detail concerning discrepancies here than he mentioned.  So this is really not new stuff.  They even get him to state that maybe he remembered the front/back from other autopsies.

The full story follows on these pages:

https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0011-pic_35.htm
https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0012-pic_36.htm
https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0013-pic_37.htm
https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0014-pic_38.htm
https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/gallery/Personal-album-of-Albert-Rossi/hmat-armdex-02-0015-0015-pic_39.htm

To summarize:

1.  Missing Navy number on top left
2.  Some numbers look like his handwriting, but some typed figures
3.  Should be signed by autopsy doctors
4.  All blanks should be filled in.  He didn't recall whether he did or not
5.  Some of the notations (kidney, lungs) were his; date wasn't; he says rest of the notations could be O'Connor's
6.  No starting time
7.  The diagram notations are not his handwriting
8.  Could not explain the changed notations
9.  Two-sided face-sheet could be a different recollection
10. He remembers the original to be neater; cannot vouch for the numbers
11. Vouches for position of back wound on face sheet

So, the story is more complicated and a little more nuanced.  But in all of this it doesn't look like there is a direct confrontation of two versions.  Jenkins is comparing the printed face sheet to what he remembers.

Nice work Albert.

It looks like he is consistent on this and has been for decades.

If you recall, Gary Aguilar discounted this as a vagary of memory.

I don't.

Man, once Purdy turned, he was Arlen Specter.

James DiEugenio wrote:Nice work Albert.

It looks like he is consistent on this and has been for decades.

If you recall, Gary Aguilar discounted this as a vagary of memory.

I don't.

Man, once Purdy turned, he was Arlen Specter.

Aguilar!  That's where I remember this from.  I thought it had a familiar ring, but I was afraid I was undergoing some sort of memory closure.  Is that in the Fetzer piece, or in How Five Investigations Got it Wrong ...?

I'll have to look.

No, at the Adolphus that Saturday night or Friday, Aguilar tried to say this was  vagary of memory by Jenkins.

I don't think so.