Air Mail Targets the JFK Case
Graydon Carter was the editor of Vanity Fair for over two decades. He retired for a while after he left in 2017. He apparently got bored. In 2019, he decided to start up another magazine, this time an online publication. It is called Air Mail. The co-editor of that ‘zine is former NY Times reporter and critic, Alessandra Stanley.
Ash Carter is the son of Graydon from his previous marriage to Cynthia Williamson. Ash has previously been an editor at Esquire and Town and Country. He has now joined forces with his father at Air Mail.
About three days ago, this site published a withering critique of another article published at Air Mail. That was written by former NY Times reporter Clifford Krauss. It amounted to a distortion of what President Kennedy’s policies were in Vietnam. Krauss wrote that there was some evidence that Kennedy was thinking of withdrawing from Vietnam after the 1964 election. In reality, Kennedy had already begun his withdrawal plan in 1962. We were specific about how that was done: by John Kenneth Galbraith going to see Defense Secretary Robert McNamara at Kennedy’s request. Then McNamara went to the commander in South Vietnam and said that it was time to start a withdrawal: we could not fight the war for Saigon. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/krauss-s-failure)
Krauss then doubled down on his wrong assumption and implied that somehow the Nhu brothers could have saved South Vietnam, and that their overthrow began America’s full entry into Indochina. As proven in that article, this is ludicrous. Ngo Dinh Diem’s government was falling apart over the Buddhist crisis. Kennedy had decided to formally enact his withdrawal with NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963. As shown in that critique, the withdrawal was not impacted by the overthrow. What impacted the withdrawal was the new president, Lyndon Johnson. He had always disagreed with Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam. And he went to work almost immediately to stop and then reverse the withdrawal. He planned out an escalation in advance, and he set State Department employee William Sullivan to work writing it out. (Truth is the First Casualty, by Joseph Goulden, pp. 88-91) This is what caused the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was essentially a declaration of war on North Vietnam. A bit more than six months later, after Johnson was inaugurated—on schedule--America went to war on land, sea and air with Hanoi.
The Krauss article should have never gotten through fact-check at Air Mail. But since Ash Carter is the article’s editor, as we shall see, that may explain why it did. Ash has now shown his true colors with a review of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book, The Housewives Underground. As discussed on this site, her book is a review of the beginnings of the Warren Commission criticism. She largely does this through the eyes of three women: Sylvia Meagher, Shirley Martin, and Maggie Field. The book is not a JFK assassination volume by any stretch of the imagination. And she is clearly not a fan of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, who did have a definite theory about the Kennedy assassination.
But apparently, even that modest goal is out of bounds for Ash Carter and Air Mail. Because he has now written something called “An Unhealthy Dose of Skepticism”. The supra title is “Grassy Knoll it alls”. This sets the scene for what is to follow. Right off the bat, Carter says that the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence were about just the shooting of Kennedy. No, they were not. And neither was the Warren Report. Much of the investigation by the FBI and Secret Service was about Lee Harvey Oswald. And many readers were disappointed in that. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 584) He also says that the famous quote by Allen Dulles about publishing the 26 volumes was to discourage publication. In every quote I have seen on this issue, Dulles was trying to encourage publication since he said no one will read it anyway except a few professors. (Commission internal memo of 9/6/64)
Some people did read the volumes. And they were stunned at what they found. Because the evidence in the volumes did not match up with the declarations in the report. In 1964, attorney Vince Salandria first took apart the Single Bullet Theory—the fulcrum of the report-- based on that evidence. In 1967, Sylvia Meagher did a detailed textual critique of the entire report, entitled Accessories After the Fact, showing its non-alignment with the evidence in the volumes.
Why is this important? Because the media failed to do what the critics did. The New York Times simply accepted the report en toto. They even printed the report as a supplement. And journalist Anthony Lewis wrote that all the evidence was now released, except for a few redacted names. Which was not true. When Dr. Gary Aguilar wrote Lewis twice as to where he got that false information; he failed to reply to either query. (JFK Revisited edited by James DiEugenio, pp. 286-87)
On top of that irresponsibility by the Times, both CBS and NBC broadcast special programs accepting the Warren Report on the day it was issued to the public. How could one possibly analyze 888 pages of text—without the underlying evidence? Which was not published for two more months.
The critics did what the MSM did not. They compared the report with the volumes of evidence. And Ash Carter belittles them for doing so. He labels them “assassination buffs”. After doing so, he then hones in on the three main characters in Tiffany’s book: Martin, Field and Meagher. Based on a previous book by Tiffany, Carter begins to go after the early critics. If you can believe it, he now compares these three persons with rock star fans, or the ‘stans’ of the boy band One Direction, which was active from 2010-16. These super fans thought that members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson were married to each other. In order to do so, the super fans made them gay.
If this was not a pointless enough comparison, one which Tiffany never mentions, Carter now equates this kind of fantasy fulfillment to what the critics did with John Kennedy: turning a Cold Warrior into a man of peace. First, Tiffany does not mention this as any kind of motive in regard to her three main characters. Not even with Martin, who voted and campaigned for Kennedy in 1960. It was Jim Garrison who first fashioned this as a motive, and he is a person who Tiffany does not like. But I would ask Mr. Carter: what happened in Indochina after Kennedy was killed? It ended up being a catastrophe, culminating in the Cambodian holocaust. Which, according to William Shawcross’s book Sideshow, was caused by Richard Nixon’s invasion of that country. That caused the fall of Sihanouk and the rise of Pol Pot. I would also ask Mr. Carter what happened in Indonesia after Kennedy’s death? According to expert Brad Simpson and his book Economists with Guns, those 1965 massacres would not have happened if Kennedy had lived. These are facts, not wish fulfillment.
What is not factual is the people and sources that Carter cites to prop up the forlorn Warren Report. My eyebrows arched at this list: Max Holland, CBS News and the late Ed Epstein. He actually uses Holland’s 11-second firing sequence for Oswald. This is something that both Dale K. Myers and Pat Speer demolished. And Speer revealed that the whole basis for that demonstration—an early shot hitting a street lamp --was false and that Holland likely knew that. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/the-lost-bullet-max-holland-gets-lost-in-space)
CBS News has never proven anything on the JFK case. In fact, the phoniness of their inquiry was exposed by a former employee, Roger Feinman. (https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/why-cbs-covered-up-the-jfk-assassination)
As per Epstein, he did not fully reveal his interview with Arlen Specter until 2015, about half a century afterward. He did so in his The JFK Assassination Diary. There he wrote that Specter ran the Zapruder film in slow motion, showing that the shots came too close together. He then told the Commissioners: We either go with the Single Bullet Theory, or we start looking for a second assassin. They did not want to do the latter. This is the kind of writer Ash Carter is. In his haste and desperation, he does not practice due diligence. Because unlike what he would have you believe, these three prove the JFK case was a conspiracy.
Carter even repeated that mildewed myth that the Commissioners never had the autopsy photos and X-rays. But if one reads the Executive Sessions hearings, both Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin and Commissioner John McCloy reveal that they did have them, and Rankin even discusses a photo that he saw. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 171)
As per the workings of the CIA/Mafia Castro assassination plots, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) declassified the CIA’s Inspector General Report on that episode back in the nineties. Did Carter read it? Maybe not. Because he says that the CIA had been ordered to “get rid” of Fidel Castro. According to that report, such was not the case. The plots were the Agency’s concept and no one else’s. (pp. 131-32) And the idea to reach out to the Mob was proposed by Dick Bissell, third in command.
As for the reason that the critics suspected Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, it was pretty simple: Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on national TV. Why would he do that, when Oswald was in the arms of the Dallas Police who would certainly arrest the killer immediately? Many people pondering this event would conclude that Ruby was intent on silencing Oswald. If so, then there was a danger in Oswald talking. Further, Ruby did not come down the Main Street ramp to do the shooting. Which likely means he had help from the police in getting in from the other side. (See HSCA, vol. 9, pp. 132-46). The House Select Committee also concluded that Ruby’s polygraph was rigged. (Vol. 8, pp. 199-21) Carter ignores all of this.
To try and discredit the critics, Carter trots out Steve Barber of all people. Barber’s work on the acoustical evidence was criticized by Josiah Thompson at length in his book Last Second in Dallas. (See also Hear No Evil by Don Thomas, pp. 632-34)
Carter closes out his article with two more slams. He says that the critics grandfathered in movements like 9-11 Truthers and anti-vaxxers. More nonsense. Suspicions about government dishonesty in epochal events did not begin with the Warren Commission. To cite just one example: in 1944, John T. Flynn wrote a 46-page pamphlet arguing that Franklin Roosevelt had plotted to provoke Japan into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. And that controversy has never stopped.
He rather predictably concludes by saying the reason for all this uproar over the JFK case is that people cannot accept that someone like Oswald alone could have killed off John Kennedy’s Camelot. Of all people, he uses that serial liar Clay Shaw to voice this antique complaint. (Destiny Betrayed, second edition, by James DiEugenio, pp. 382-88) Wrong again, Mr. Carter. The reason many cannot accept the Commission is because of the massive exculpatory evidence against their verdict. Just read Gerald McKnight’s Breach of Trust for one example.
Amazingly, Carter does not mention the Assassination Records Review Board. They operated from 1994-98 and declassified 2 million pages of documents and did a very important examination of the medical evidence. Which is another subject Ash Carter does not review. That body gave us a much more rounded and in-depth picture of what really happened in Dallas and with Oswald. For example, Betsy Wolf’s examination of the Oswald file shows that the CIA rigged that file from the beginning. And the testimony of autopsy photographer John Stringer reveals that he did not take the photos of Kennedy’s brain that are in the National Archives. Which leaves the question: then who did?
At the end, Carter informs us that he is editing a collection of the deceased Edward Epstein’s articles. After this performance, I am not looking forward to that book.
