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JFK vs. CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency's Assassination of the President
Discover who in the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated the assassination. Learn the social, political and economic factors leading to the termination of JFK's presidency. Follow the step by step analysis as the conspiracy climaxes into treason.
- GenresHistory
385 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 7, 2014
After reading a lot of dross on the JFK assassination in books published in 2013, this little gem from Michael Calder, copyright 1998, was like manna from heaven.
However, 'JFK vs. CIA' was no revelation for me. I learned very little from this book. I avidly research the political killings of the 1960's, and the Kennedy murder in particular, and Calder has gone along with everything that I hold to be the truth behind the events in Dallas. The assassination was a coup d'état. It was executed by the CIA and Military Intelligence, with complicity by elements of the Secret Service. The FBI assisted the cover-up. Oswald was a CIA operative, a patsy, and was stood in the doorway of the TSBD when shots were being fired at the president, framed (again) in the Altgens photograph. Kennedy's body was stolen and a pre-autopsy performed between Parkland and Bethesda. Ruby was instructed to eliminate Oswald.
The author does not produce any startling smoking guns, does not reveal identities of mechanics, nor reveal any long hidden documentation or participant confessions to prove the case. His U.C. Berkeley thesis is built upon solid analysis, a logical appraisal of JFK's tenure in the White House and the exposure of statements and outright lies given in testimony to bodies such as Warren and HSCA etc. It is true that Michael Calder does commit many assumptions and suggestions in his text, but for me, he makes four, when putting two and two together.
After over half a century, does it matter? Is it now too late for any definitive proof of guilt? Who cares? I believe it is vital for history and present day political viability for the truth to emerge. It is time for the CIA to 'fess up'. I believe also that the U.S. government knows what happened, not just to JFK but also to RFK. The agency also killed many honourable people, and many not so honourable, in the cover-up. The subversion of democratic process by government agencies is not to be kept hidden. The dross that is printed and promoted still, that repeats by rote, the lone-nut nonsense of these murders, proves that government and media wish to continue their deceptions. Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
However, 'JFK vs. CIA' was no revelation for me. I learned very little from this book. I avidly research the political killings of the 1960's, and the Kennedy murder in particular, and Calder has gone along with everything that I hold to be the truth behind the events in Dallas. The assassination was a coup d'état. It was executed by the CIA and Military Intelligence, with complicity by elements of the Secret Service. The FBI assisted the cover-up. Oswald was a CIA operative, a patsy, and was stood in the doorway of the TSBD when shots were being fired at the president, framed (again) in the Altgens photograph. Kennedy's body was stolen and a pre-autopsy performed between Parkland and Bethesda. Ruby was instructed to eliminate Oswald.
The author does not produce any startling smoking guns, does not reveal identities of mechanics, nor reveal any long hidden documentation or participant confessions to prove the case. His U.C. Berkeley thesis is built upon solid analysis, a logical appraisal of JFK's tenure in the White House and the exposure of statements and outright lies given in testimony to bodies such as Warren and HSCA etc. It is true that Michael Calder does commit many assumptions and suggestions in his text, but for me, he makes four, when putting two and two together.
After over half a century, does it matter? Is it now too late for any definitive proof of guilt? Who cares? I believe it is vital for history and present day political viability for the truth to emerge. It is time for the CIA to 'fess up'. I believe also that the U.S. government knows what happened, not just to JFK but also to RFK. The agency also killed many honourable people, and many not so honourable, in the cover-up. The subversion of democratic process by government agencies is not to be kept hidden. The dross that is printed and promoted still, that repeats by rote, the lone-nut nonsense of these murders, proves that government and media wish to continue their deceptions. Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
May 11, 2013
This book is a devastating achievement by Michael Calder in that it is an extraordinarily complete look at one of the major US political events in the 20th Century. It not only gives the reader a detailed description of the failings of the Warren Commission report (fairly standard stuff well know to those of us who have spent years reading books that challenge the "lone gunman" scenario imposed upon the Commission by LBJ via his Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach) but describes, as Calder puts it: "the Social, Political and economic Factors which led to his assassination by the CIA."
After PART I - THE WARREN COMMISSION" comes PART II - JFK VS. BUSINESS, PART III - JFK VS. THE MILITARY, PART IV - JFK VS. CIA. These three segments of the book describe major US power circles and how they became hostile to JFK and his policies, leading to their approval of his removal by assassination. In PART V - THE PLAYERS Calder describes in detail the individuals who were the principal figures in the planning of the assassination (Oswald, Ruby, with a special emphasis on the principal plotter of his assassination, key CIA operative Richard Helms.
The rest of the book is a revelatory, detailed countdown to the assassination.
An outstanding read!
After PART I - THE WARREN COMMISSION" comes PART II - JFK VS. BUSINESS, PART III - JFK VS. THE MILITARY, PART IV - JFK VS. CIA. These three segments of the book describe major US power circles and how they became hostile to JFK and his policies, leading to their approval of his removal by assassination. In PART V - THE PLAYERS Calder describes in detail the individuals who were the principal figures in the planning of the assassination (Oswald, Ruby, with a special emphasis on the principal plotter of his assassination, key CIA operative Richard Helms.
The rest of the book is a revelatory, detailed countdown to the assassination.
An outstanding read!
August 17, 2023
useful in some ways, screwed up in other ways
----
Amazone
Strong Effort Undone by Overconfidence
8/10
Mr. Calder has written a powerful but deeply flawed book. He offers a seemingly coherent integration of the entire official assassination corpus (Warren Commission, Schweiker Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations), which he has not merely read, but apparently inhabited.
Calder offers a wealth of characters and factual details that informs who did what when and where. But just as importantly, Calder has delved into both popular and obscure contemporaneous journals that illuminate precisely why the financial elite, the military establishment, and the CIA hegemony considered JFK nearly treasonous, a closet socialist, and a national security threat.
The US media establishment, strongly allied with the CIA and military intelligence units that effected the murder, has worked concertedly to obscure these motives, but Calder brings them into bold relief.
Unfortunately, Calder lacks scholarly competence and basic judgment, so casts into doubt the other allegations and inference that make his findings so rich.
For example, Calder dismisses the possibility that Oswald might have been a shooter because, he proclaims, the famous photo by James Altgens taken just when JFK clutched his throat, shows Oswald standing in front of the Texas State Book Depository, not in its sixth floor "sniper's nest." That Oswald is the man in Altgens' photo is a major point to which Calder devotes four pages of detailed argument (pp.23-26). The Warren Commission concluded that the man in the photo was Oswald look-alike co-worker Billy Lovelady. Calder cites the testimony of four co-workers of Lovelady and Oswald who were standing outside the Depository in the shadows behind the disputed "Oswald" figure to the effect that Lovelady was with them, hence in the shadows, hence not the man in the photo. Calder ignores that one eyewitness has Lovelady standing, another sitting, and Calder completely ignores the fact that eyewitness testimony is inexact and often is in error. Calder ignores that this testimony collectively locates Lovelady in the general area of the "Oswald" figure, so that a reasonable question is whether or not Lovelady was a little in front of them in the light while they remained unseen in the shadows. But Calder argues that such points need not even be considered since Lovelady was wearing a red striped shirt that day, whereas the man in the photo has on a plaid shirt over a white t-shirt.
Calder's book was published in 1998. Robert J. Groden, to whose efforts the public owes its first access to the Zapruder film in the 1970s - CIA asset Henry Luce had Life purchase and sequester the film - has spent his life exposing the JFK conspiracy.
In 1993 Groden wrote The Killing of a President, and addressed the issue of Billy Lovelady on pp. 186-187 with material straight from Groden's contribution to the HSCA conclusions. Groden advises that Lovelady's resemblance to Oswald was so strong that Lovelady's wife had mistaken Oswald for him across a room; when the FBI asked Lovelady to come in to be photographed they told him that there was no need to wear the same shirt, so Lovelady wore one with vertical red stripes; Lovelady still had the plaid shirt he wore in the Altgens' photo packed away and posed in it for Groden.
Groden's book is a coffee-table classic, yet Calder never addresses its points, despite publishing five years later and twenty years after the HSCA report. Worse, had Groden never done his research, Calder's identification of the man in the photo with Oswald lacks prima facie plausibility. In all his close scrutiny of the records, in all his deep inhabiting of the characters and players of this drama, it never occurs to Calder that had the man in the photo been Lee Harvey Oswald, one or more of the four co-workers over whose sworn testimony he labors who make the identification, would have said, in effect, "And there right in front of us was ol' Lee Oswald watching the President go by." The absence of any such remarks never registers on Calder as evidence of Oswald's absence. Calder is not the man in whom we can place implicit trust to pick the right characters and the right connections amongst them to unravel the JFK conspiracy, though he may have taken us much closer to the goal.
Calder makes many such errors, but this is a brief review, so three final examples. First, Calder declares pp.67-68 that Lt. Day must have taken a palm print from Oswald's corpse because two experts testified that the print was "fresh," that it came from porous cardboard on which it could not last more than 24 hours, and yet the FBI received it from Day five days after the assassination. Calder has leapt to this bizarre conclusion because he fails to understand that the experts are merely stating that the print had to be fresh when it was dusted.
Second, Calder is so much the diviner by the book's end that he feels he has only to mention a death to reveal it as CIA handiwork. On p.351 he advises that six FBI agents involved in the original investigation who were scheduled to testify at the HSCA died within six months of each other and declares, "The CIA was back." We'd like to know their names, how they died, and which of their deaths can be reasonably construed as CIA hits.
One must be William Sullivan, whose 11/9/77 death by hunting accident I long believed was a CIA murder until I read the police reports. Unless these were brilliant forgeries, Sullivan's death was a tragic hunting accident in which the shooter was a teenaged son of a local peace officer, both of whom knew and were on good terms with Sullivan. The youth was overwrought by what he had done.
Third, Calder takes the suicide of William Bruce Pitzer, whom Calder mis-describes as the JFK Bethesda autopsy photographer, as a CIA murder, but the meticulous research by Allan Eaglesham over the course of a decade has shown it to be a genuine suicide.
Michael Green
----
Amazone
Strong Effort Undone by Overconfidence
8/10
Mr. Calder has written a powerful but deeply flawed book. He offers a seemingly coherent integration of the entire official assassination corpus (Warren Commission, Schweiker Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations), which he has not merely read, but apparently inhabited.
Calder offers a wealth of characters and factual details that informs who did what when and where. But just as importantly, Calder has delved into both popular and obscure contemporaneous journals that illuminate precisely why the financial elite, the military establishment, and the CIA hegemony considered JFK nearly treasonous, a closet socialist, and a national security threat.
The US media establishment, strongly allied with the CIA and military intelligence units that effected the murder, has worked concertedly to obscure these motives, but Calder brings them into bold relief.
Unfortunately, Calder lacks scholarly competence and basic judgment, so casts into doubt the other allegations and inference that make his findings so rich.
For example, Calder dismisses the possibility that Oswald might have been a shooter because, he proclaims, the famous photo by James Altgens taken just when JFK clutched his throat, shows Oswald standing in front of the Texas State Book Depository, not in its sixth floor "sniper's nest." That Oswald is the man in Altgens' photo is a major point to which Calder devotes four pages of detailed argument (pp.23-26). The Warren Commission concluded that the man in the photo was Oswald look-alike co-worker Billy Lovelady. Calder cites the testimony of four co-workers of Lovelady and Oswald who were standing outside the Depository in the shadows behind the disputed "Oswald" figure to the effect that Lovelady was with them, hence in the shadows, hence not the man in the photo. Calder ignores that one eyewitness has Lovelady standing, another sitting, and Calder completely ignores the fact that eyewitness testimony is inexact and often is in error. Calder ignores that this testimony collectively locates Lovelady in the general area of the "Oswald" figure, so that a reasonable question is whether or not Lovelady was a little in front of them in the light while they remained unseen in the shadows. But Calder argues that such points need not even be considered since Lovelady was wearing a red striped shirt that day, whereas the man in the photo has on a plaid shirt over a white t-shirt.
Calder's book was published in 1998. Robert J. Groden, to whose efforts the public owes its first access to the Zapruder film in the 1970s - CIA asset Henry Luce had Life purchase and sequester the film - has spent his life exposing the JFK conspiracy.
In 1993 Groden wrote The Killing of a President, and addressed the issue of Billy Lovelady on pp. 186-187 with material straight from Groden's contribution to the HSCA conclusions. Groden advises that Lovelady's resemblance to Oswald was so strong that Lovelady's wife had mistaken Oswald for him across a room; when the FBI asked Lovelady to come in to be photographed they told him that there was no need to wear the same shirt, so Lovelady wore one with vertical red stripes; Lovelady still had the plaid shirt he wore in the Altgens' photo packed away and posed in it for Groden.
Groden's book is a coffee-table classic, yet Calder never addresses its points, despite publishing five years later and twenty years after the HSCA report. Worse, had Groden never done his research, Calder's identification of the man in the photo with Oswald lacks prima facie plausibility. In all his close scrutiny of the records, in all his deep inhabiting of the characters and players of this drama, it never occurs to Calder that had the man in the photo been Lee Harvey Oswald, one or more of the four co-workers over whose sworn testimony he labors who make the identification, would have said, in effect, "And there right in front of us was ol' Lee Oswald watching the President go by." The absence of any such remarks never registers on Calder as evidence of Oswald's absence. Calder is not the man in whom we can place implicit trust to pick the right characters and the right connections amongst them to unravel the JFK conspiracy, though he may have taken us much closer to the goal.
Calder makes many such errors, but this is a brief review, so three final examples. First, Calder declares pp.67-68 that Lt. Day must have taken a palm print from Oswald's corpse because two experts testified that the print was "fresh," that it came from porous cardboard on which it could not last more than 24 hours, and yet the FBI received it from Day five days after the assassination. Calder has leapt to this bizarre conclusion because he fails to understand that the experts are merely stating that the print had to be fresh when it was dusted.
Second, Calder is so much the diviner by the book's end that he feels he has only to mention a death to reveal it as CIA handiwork. On p.351 he advises that six FBI agents involved in the original investigation who were scheduled to testify at the HSCA died within six months of each other and declares, "The CIA was back." We'd like to know their names, how they died, and which of their deaths can be reasonably construed as CIA hits.
One must be William Sullivan, whose 11/9/77 death by hunting accident I long believed was a CIA murder until I read the police reports. Unless these were brilliant forgeries, Sullivan's death was a tragic hunting accident in which the shooter was a teenaged son of a local peace officer, both of whom knew and were on good terms with Sullivan. The youth was overwrought by what he had done.
Third, Calder takes the suicide of William Bruce Pitzer, whom Calder mis-describes as the JFK Bethesda autopsy photographer, as a CIA murder, but the meticulous research by Allan Eaglesham over the course of a decade has shown it to be a genuine suicide.
Michael Green
January 24, 2008
This book can be summed up in one word; WOW! The author brings forth proof of the truth behind the assassination of JFK.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews