Stop Kennedy Smears!
Robert Greenwald, bless him, is gathering signatures in an effort to persuade the History Channel to act like a History Channel and not like an adjunct of Rush Limbaugh, distorting history to serve an agenda.
Greenwald sees this as a politically motivated effort. I see something more sinister, as I'll explain in a minute.
This upcoming miniseries is produced by Joel Surnow, producer of "24" and written by one of his writers on 24, a guy who claims to be a liberal but does not appear to have made any political contributions to any liberal candidates.
Watch the clips here, and then sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
Here's what actual historians - not all of them fans of Kennedy - have to say about the script:
Here's what an outraged David Talbot, the creator and former Editor-in-Chief of Salon.com, said when he heard his book Brothers was used as a source for the miniseries:
And here's a clip of Robert Greenwald talking on MSNBC yesterday about his effort:
I'll ask again - please sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
I also encourage you to find a copy of the book Jim DiEugenio and I put together. There are a couple of articles in that book by Jim that you can't find online, including Jim's seminal essay on "The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy." Because Jim's essay describes why projects like this our made: if John Kennedy was a horrible person, who cares who killed him? Bottom line, that's the agenda.
Jim's article goes into the details of two women most often linked to Kennedy - Judith Campbell "the Government wants me to talk again" Exner and Mary (wife of CIA heavy Cord) Meyer, and shows how flimsy the accusations are that they in any way shaped policy or had any serious influence on Kennedy.
And I can't help but remember walking by the newsstand one day and seeing another woman claiming to have slept with Kennedy. I burst out laughing, but then felt like crying because I was one of a handful of people in the country who got the joke. The woman was Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a journalist who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald four years before Kennedy was shot, and who wrote a book afterwards titled Marina and Lee that Marina, Oswald's wife, called a pack of lies. Would it surprise you to learn that Priscilla's CIA file listed her as a "witting collaborator"?
When I saw that, I began to wonder how many other of Kennedy's supposed paramours were also CIA assets, perhaps on assignment to smear the man so no one would care enough to look for the CIA's hand in his death?
So while Greenwald sees this as a political maneuver, I believe this springs less from Joel Surnow's relationship with Limbaugh and the right and more from his connections to the intelligence agencies in general and the CIA in particular. The strongest evidence in this case points to high-ranking members of the CIA being involved in the plotting and cover-up of the assassination of President Kennedy. (See our book for a plethora of evidence in this regard, presented with solid factual references to actual CIA documents housed at the National Archives.)
But maybe Greenwald is right. Maybe Joel just hates everything Kennedy did and stood for. And maybe his sidekick writer is just gullible enough to fall for all that bogus sex stuff that's been added to the record. I have a strong suspicion some of his "source" material came from C. David Heymann, whose books are so factually inaccurate I felt the need to expose him in full. See my essay on his fabrications and listen to me talk about him on Black Op Radio.
Either way, the show absolutely is not history. It is fiction. And not even close or loosely adapted fiction, but outrageously wrong, inaccurate, fiction. Do you really think that should be presented by the "History" channel? I don't.
Please join me in signing that petition. And please stick your neck out a bit and ask your friends to sign up too. No one deserves to have not only their life taken from them, but their legacy as well. That's a crime against Real History.
So sign the petition already! Thanks for caring. http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
Greenwald sees this as a politically motivated effort. I see something more sinister, as I'll explain in a minute.
This upcoming miniseries is produced by Joel Surnow, producer of "24" and written by one of his writers on 24, a guy who claims to be a liberal but does not appear to have made any political contributions to any liberal candidates.
Watch the clips here, and then sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
Here's what actual historians - not all of them fans of Kennedy - have to say about the script:
Here's what an outraged David Talbot, the creator and former Editor-in-Chief of Salon.com, said when he heard his book Brothers was used as a source for the miniseries:
And here's a clip of Robert Greenwald talking on MSNBC yesterday about his effort:
I'll ask again - please sign the petition at http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
I also encourage you to find a copy of the book Jim DiEugenio and I put together. There are a couple of articles in that book by Jim that you can't find online, including Jim's seminal essay on "The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy." Because Jim's essay describes why projects like this our made: if John Kennedy was a horrible person, who cares who killed him? Bottom line, that's the agenda.
Jim's article goes into the details of two women most often linked to Kennedy - Judith Campbell "the Government wants me to talk again" Exner and Mary (wife of CIA heavy Cord) Meyer, and shows how flimsy the accusations are that they in any way shaped policy or had any serious influence on Kennedy.
And I can't help but remember walking by the newsstand one day and seeing another woman claiming to have slept with Kennedy. I burst out laughing, but then felt like crying because I was one of a handful of people in the country who got the joke. The woman was Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a journalist who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald four years before Kennedy was shot, and who wrote a book afterwards titled Marina and Lee that Marina, Oswald's wife, called a pack of lies. Would it surprise you to learn that Priscilla's CIA file listed her as a "witting collaborator"?
When I saw that, I began to wonder how many other of Kennedy's supposed paramours were also CIA assets, perhaps on assignment to smear the man so no one would care enough to look for the CIA's hand in his death?
So while Greenwald sees this as a political maneuver, I believe this springs less from Joel Surnow's relationship with Limbaugh and the right and more from his connections to the intelligence agencies in general and the CIA in particular. The strongest evidence in this case points to high-ranking members of the CIA being involved in the plotting and cover-up of the assassination of President Kennedy. (See our book for a plethora of evidence in this regard, presented with solid factual references to actual CIA documents housed at the National Archives.)
But maybe Greenwald is right. Maybe Joel just hates everything Kennedy did and stood for. And maybe his sidekick writer is just gullible enough to fall for all that bogus sex stuff that's been added to the record. I have a strong suspicion some of his "source" material came from C. David Heymann, whose books are so factually inaccurate I felt the need to expose him in full. See my essay on his fabrications and listen to me talk about him on Black Op Radio.
Either way, the show absolutely is not history. It is fiction. And not even close or loosely adapted fiction, but outrageously wrong, inaccurate, fiction. Do you really think that should be presented by the "History" channel? I don't.
Please join me in signing that petition. And please stick your neck out a bit and ask your friends to sign up too. No one deserves to have not only their life taken from them, but their legacy as well. That's a crime against Real History.
So sign the petition already! Thanks for caring. http://stopkennedysmears.com/.
posted by Real History Lisa at 8:01 PM - Permanent Link -
3 Comments:
There cannot be too much written to
demonstrate that by virture of presenting this trash as "history" the History Channel has sunk to a new low. Books like David Talbot's Brothers and James Douglas JFK and the Unspeakable portray just how courageous and honorable a man JFK truly was. This is true history. But the rulers of mainstream media MUST, as you say continue to paint him as a horrible man exactly so that no one will care why he was killed. This is always what it has been about. Maintaining the WC travesty,
I wish there was someone with History Channel connections to make a documentary of JFK and the Unspeakable. Alas, cannot have the truth on "the history channel".
I have signed the petition, sent it to others, and if this filth does air will never watch a thing on that channel again.
Viewers need to contact HC and make their views known. It just might cause them to re-think showing this vile distortion.
Dawn
Dear Lisa,
Agreed.
I admit that I've gone through a rather circular evolution on JFK. As a kid, I automatically bought that he was great. Later, I believed the stories of sexcapades and Mob links, and I judged him harshly.
Recently, thanks to my voracious research into many sources on the Internet, and thanks to you, and to many others, I know JFK wasn't perfect, he had affairs, but he was the best president we've had in my lifetime. JFK actually made moves against the criminal CIA and the criminal Federal Reserve, which got him killed. So, by modern American history standards, JFK is an American hero.
My research has gone well beyond the assassinations, recent puppet presidents, and CIA crimes. I'll soon launch a website to not only lay out the big picture but also offer a nonviolent way for us to return our country to a true representative democracy.
A final note. We know the CIA pays people to write books of disinformation. Obviously, the CIA pays producers and directors to make films of disinformation. Those are crimes against our Constitution, of course. They also counter-blog, spreading their lies and disruptions, as anyone can see on the websites and blogs that get a lot of comments from readers.
Well done, Lisa. Thanks, again.
-- James T. Laffrey
One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, is "History is a series of agreed-upon lies." Not that Napoleon would have been more honest, mind you, but that he understood the process.
DiEugenio's essay is a must-read for anyone interested in not only the truth surrounding JFK's death, but in how propaganda works in America. Not on this point but another good book on propaganda in the US is THE SCIENCE OF COERCION, written by Christopher Simpson.
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