Among other speakers are: Dr. Gary Aguilar, Russ Baker, Jim DiEugenio, Dr. Peter Kornbluh, Robert Groden, Prof. Joan Mellen, Jefferson Morley, Prof. John Newman, Dr. Randolph Robertson, Lisa Pease, Prof. Peter Dale Scott, Dr. Wayne Smith, Pat Speer, Anthony Summers, David Talbot, Dr. Donald Thomas, Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, Lamar Waldron, and Dr. David Wrone.
Actors Brian Connors and John Heard are flying to DC from Hollywood to lead a free dramatic reading of a transcript of a Warren Commission secret meeting, one they thought was not recorded, showing the leadership role of former CIA Director Allen Dulles in the Commission's work and their own doubts about what they were doing.
President Kennedy resisted the CIA's growing influence over public life. Thus, Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs, vowed to break the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind. In the fall of 1961, he forced out the CIA's top leadership, including Dulles and his two deputies. One was General Charles Cabell, brother of the mayor of Dallas. In the budget JFK sent to Congress in 1963, he suggested major cuts to the CIA's budget.
Similarities to Kennedy's concerns can be found in the words of his two presidential predecessors, Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Dwight Eisenhower. At times, they each expressed deep concern about the threat to America's traditions from, as Eisenhower described it in his 1961 Farewell Address, "The military and industrial complex."
In many ways, the debate over JFK's murder pits the nation's elite -- including government agencies and the national media -- against public opinion.
The rush to judgment is apparent in a CBS documentary on the Warren report aired 50 years ago. For nearly the entire two-hour broadcast, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite and a youthful Dan Rather parroted in somber tones the commission's murder case against Oswald. They contrasted what Cronkite "the liar, the misfit" against what the announcer described as a thorough investigation by "seven distinguished Americans" finding guilt.
We know from declassified documents that the CIA's Operation Mockingbird played an immense role later in persuading its allies in the news media at the ownership level and in academia to defend the Warren Report.
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