American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us by Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell Read Free Book Online Page A

possibility that both of them, Lee and Harvey, were in the book depository at the same time.
    My hunch is that they were both part of a false defector program that James Angleton and his friends in counterintelligence were running out of the CIA. While Harvey was over in Russia, Lee was working with anti-Castro Cubans in Florida planning to bump off Castro (he was seen by a number of people down there at the same time). Harvey, the wimpy-chinned one in the photographs, was married to Marina. Lee, the thick-necked one, was used to set up Harvey. I believe it’s Harvey laying in the grave, and whatever happened to Lee, I have no idea.
    In Armstrong’s book, there’s also the matter of the two mothers. Apparently the real Oswald mother was quite an attractive tall woman, but then you’ve also got short, dumpy Marguerite. What proves to me that she was a fraud? In one interview she gave, she had Lee’s birthday wrong. I don’t know of a woman who’s ever given birth to a child that can’t remember the day.
    I can’t end this chapter without a few words about the national media’s role in the cover-up. 22 The very first dispatch out of Dallas on November 22, 1963, came from the Associated Press : “The shots apparently came from a grassy knoll in the area.” That was the news in most of the early reports, though it was soon replaced by the Texas School Book Depository.
    Dan Rather, who was a local newsman in Dallas at the time, was the first journalist to see the 20-second-long “home movie” taken by dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Rather then told a national TV audience that the fatal shot drove the president’s head “violently forward,” when the footage showed just the opposite! Later on, in his book The Camera Never Blinks , Rather defended his “mistake” saying it was because his watching the film had been so rushed.
    But nobody could question this at the time, because Time-Life snapped up the Zapruder film for $150,000—a small fortune back then—and battled for years to keep it out of the public domain. The Life magazine publisher, C.D. Jackson, was “so upset by the head-wound sequence,” according to Richard Stolley, who was then the magazine’s L.A. bureau chief, “that he proposed the company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions calmed.”
    We didn’t find out until 1977, when Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on “The CIA and the Media,” why we should have been upset about C.D. Jackson. Bernstein explained: “For many years, [Time-Life founder Henry] Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a Time, Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. While a Time executive, Jackson coauthored a CIA-sponsored study recommending the reorganization of the American intelligence services in the early 1950s.” He also “approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe.” (Mrs. Luce was a member of the Committee to Free Cuba, and right after the assassination started putting out information connecting Oswald to Cuba—information she received from a group of CIA-backed Cuban exiles that she supported. The CIA still won’t release its files about that group.)
    Life published a story headlined “End of Nagging Rumors: The Critical Six Seconds” (December 6, 1963), that claimed to show precisely how Oswald had succeeded in hitting his target. Supposedly based on the Zapruder film, the magazine said that the president had been turning to wave to someone in the crowd when one of Oswald’s bullets hit him in the throat. But guess what? That sequence is nowhere to be seen in the film.
    From the get-go, Oswald was damned as