An Open Letter to Ash Carter
Dear Mr. Carter:
I have chosen to write you this open letter since I think the subject matter will be of some importance to a wider audience than just ourselves.
You are billed as the features editor at Air Mail. In the space of about three weeks, that publication printed two articles of dubious value: one on John Kennedy’s presidency and one dealing with his assassination. The latter was actually written by you. It was ostensibly about Kaitlyn Tiffany’s new book called The Housewives Underground. Having read and reviewed the volume, that book is not really a JFK assassination book. It mounts no theory as to how or why Kennedy was killed. It simply chronicles the growing critical movement opposed to the Warren Report. It focuses on three women who banded together to ask questions about the report’s conclusions: Maggie Field, Shirley Martin and Sylvia Meagher. Tiffany takes no position on the actual murder of JFK. And she has little sympathy for a person who did, namely Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA who indicted Clay Shaw and unsuccessfully prosecuted him on conspiracy charges.
But evidently, even that was too much for Air Mail. You yourself took the time to write a belittling article that was not really about the book, but about the movement and about the facts of the JFK case. You mentioned the likes of CBS News, Max Holland, and the late Edward Epstein in support of the official story. In my discussion of your article, I showed why these are all quite faulty sources. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/air-mail-targets-the-jfk-case)
Mr. Carter, the official story proffered by the Warren Commission is pure gas. It is unsupportable. Let me quickly go through five reasons that neither you nor Tiffany review as to why.
- CE 399 is not the projectile found at Parkland Hospital. Josiah Thompson discovered this when he interviewed the security manager at Parkland, O. P. Wright—something that Arlen Specter did not do. When Thompson showed him a picture of CE 399, the official magic bullet, Wright said that was not the bullet he turned over to the Secret Service on the day of the assassination. He took another bullet out of his drawer, different in shape and hue, and said this was like the bullet he turned over. (Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)
- The original bullet, the one actually turned over and then substituted, was not found on Governor John Connally’s stretcher. It was found on a little boy named Ronnie Fuller’s stretcher. Which blows up the single bullet theory again. Thompson spends ten pages, including charts and illustrations, proving this was the case. (Thompson, pp. 154-64) Further, much later, Thompson returned to Dallas looking for Wright. He had passed, but he found his widow. She had been a nurse at Parkland at the time and was now a nurse’s manager. When he brought up the subject matter, she said words to the effect: Oh, we were finding all kinds of bullets that day. It got to the point that our supervisor threw up her hands and said, Who’s doing this?
- The rifle in question is not the rifle the Commission says that Oswald ordered. Oswald allegedly ordered a 36-inch carbine. The rifle in evidence is a 40.2-inch short rifle. The report never explained the difference. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 81-87) Further, there is a screwed-in butt attachment to the rifle in evidence that, according to a SWAT team professional, could not have been done by Oswald.
- Sebastian LaTona was the foremost expert the FBI had on fingerprinting in 1963. He wrote a manual that was used by most police departments throughout the country. Former New York prosecuting attorney Bob Tanenbaum once said, you felt lucky to get this guy to testify because every DA in the country wanted him. The night of the assassination, he could not find any prints of value on the rifle, and he tried everything in his battery. (Warren Commission Vol. 4, pp. 20-23)
- The pictures and illustrations of Kennedy’s brain at the National Archives cannot be of his brain. They depict a pretty much intact brain weighing 1500 grams. According to a Danish study, the average brain weight was about 1340 grams. How can Kennedy’s brain weight be above the average with all the damage to Kennedy’s head we see in films and photos, not to mention the blood and tissue which went all over Dealey Plaza? Plus hospital witnesses who saw the brain said a significant part was blown off. Finally, when the official autopsy photographer John Stringer was placed under oath by the Assassination Records Review Board—a body that neither you nor Tiffany mention--he stated that he did not take those pictures. Then who did, and why? (The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, by James DiEugenio, pp. 161-64)
In reality, if this case were not dealing with the death of JFK, it would be thrown out of court before it came to trial on the basis of evidence alteration.
The second article I objected to was one by Clifford Krauss. ( Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/krauss-s-failure) This was about Kennedy and Vietnam. In his article, he wrote that there was evidence that JFK was going to withdraw from Indochina after the 1964 election. This is utterly wrong. The declassified record proves that Kennedy started his withdrawal plan in April of 1962. The Pentagon, CIA and State Department submitted withdrawal schedules in May of 1963. Kennedy then certified that program in October of 1963, to begin in two months. This is all provable by the adduced record.
The second objectionable assumption in the Krauss article is this: that somehow the Nhu brothers could have saved Vietnam if Kennedy had backed them more strongly. This is so off the wall that I did not think anyone could make such an argument today. Once the Ngo Dinh Diem regime began raiding the Buddhist pagodas in August of 1963, the writing was on the wall—if not before that. Because the rebellion was now spreading from the countryside into the cities. Now Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother Nhu began negotiating with the north and also faking coups in order to smoke out possible plotters.
As I noted in my discussion of Krauss, the Buddhist uprising was the reason for the final, successful overthrow. As Vietnam expert John Newman noted, Diem’s government was collapsing, which is why he was talking to the north. But Hanoi made an impossible demand on him: the Americans had to leave.
The idea that somehow the Nhu brothers could have saved Saigon is simply wild. Because ultimately, 540,00 American combat troops, the biggest air campaign ever in Rolling Thunder, and the invasion of Laos and Cambodia could not achieve that goal.
Kennedy realized that. Which is why he began planning to leave in 1962. Somehow Air Mail does not want its readers to know that.
