This is an intriguing documentary about J Edgar Hoover, founding director of the FBI. It’s largely based on an official federal investigation that occurred shortly after Hoover’s death in 1972 and Anthony Summer’s 2013 book Official and Confidential: the Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover.
The film explores Hoover’s long track record of both low level and high level corruption. The former involved his routine use of FBI employees to drive him to private functions and to remodel and redecorate his home, as well as the routine use of taxpayer funds to pay for private vacations. The high level corruption involved his close association with Mob figures to fuel his (illegal) offtrack betting habit.
Hoover was notorious for his refusal to investigate or arrest organized crime bosses during his tenure of office. He consistently maintained the US had no national organized crime problem. This was the major cause of his three year battle with John and Bobby Kennedy – which ended in the JFK assassination.
The documentary also reveals how Hoover forced Kennedy to accept Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, by threatening to release surveillance tapes the FBI had made of JFK’s extramarital affairs.
Hoover undertook this type of illegal surveillance on most, if not, all major Washington political figures. He also routinely made it known to lawmakers when he had compromising files on them. These files made him virtually untouchable despite fairly wide knowledge of his own corrupt activities.
Hoover, in turn, was held in check by senior Mob figures who had photos of Hoover engaged in sexual relations with his lover and lifetime partner Clyde Tolson. Officially Hoover condemned homosexuality as a sexual perversion and banned gays from serving as FBI agents.
In Part 6 of Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone reveals that Kennedy vacillated between supporting and opposing the anti-communist Pentagon hawks who tried to control his foreign policy.
In 1960, JFK made the “missile gap” (ie the so-called Soviet advantage in strategic weapons) a major plank of his campaign – only to discover (on taking office) that the US was far ahead in every category.
Under pressure from the CIA and Joint Chiefs, he initially approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, only to refuse to authorize air support when he discovered they had lied to him about domestic Cuban support for the invasion.
After the bungled Bay of Pigs operation, he fired Allen Dulles and other top CIA officials and placed all overseas CIA operations under State Department control. At the same time, he also put his brother Bobby in charge of Operation Mongoose, a secret program in Louisiana to train Cuban exiles to overthrow and/or poison Castro (Joan Mellen discusses Bobby’s role at length in her 2013 book on the JFK assassination – see New Evidence in the JFK Assassination).
He resisted pressure from the Joint Chiefs to invade Laos.
Despite resisting pressure from the Pentagon to increase arms expenditures, in 1961 he warned the American people against dangerous Soviet aggression and encouraged them to build fallout shelters.
He approved the deployment of 16,000 advisors (in addition to CIA personnel) to engage in guerilla warfare in Vietnam. He also approved Operation Phoenix, which involved massive defoliation of the Vietnamese with cancer and birth defect-causing Agent Orange, the assassination of labor leaders and human rights advocates and the mass displacement of Vietnamese civilians into concentration camps.
He resisted pressure from the Joint Chiefs to launch a nuclear strike on Cuba when a U2 spy plane discovered the Soviets had supplied Castro with nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
Most of the episode focuses on the naval blockade JFK imposed on Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis and the delicate negotiations between him and Khrushchev to prevent this event from escalating into full blown nuclear war.
It’s Stone’s view that both Kennedy and Khrushchev lost control of their militaries during this period. According to Stone, it was down to a single brave Soviet submarine commander that global nuclear annihilation was averted in 1962. He believes the near-miss in Cuba caused Kennedy to rethink US involvement in Vietnam – and issue National Security Memorandum 263 in summer 1963. The latter ordered the gradual withdrawal of all US forces from Vietnam to commence in December 1963.
Johnson would reverse this directive within weeks of the JFK assassination.
The forensic evidence establishes pretty clearly that Robert Kennedy’s alleged assassin wasn’t a lone nut gunman (to begin with there were too many bullets). So why is he still in prison after 48 years?
obby Kennedy was shot to death 48 years ago. Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted for his murder, doesn’t remember anything about that night. But he does know things about the past. His parole hearing is February 10. What can he say?
If he had shown remorse, he might have been freed a long time ago. Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace, was freed several years ago. How can you show remorse if something is wrong with your mind?
(photo: Bettmann/Corbis)
After Bobby was shot, the Los Angeles coroner, Thomas Noguchi, conducted what has been called “the perfect autopsy.” Noguchi was praised by everyone. After a string of controversial assassinations, he couldn’t be too careful.
After ballistics tests, Noguchi concluded that the fatal shot was one inch away from the back of Bobby’s head. There was a problem. Everyone agreed that Sirhan shot him from the front, and never got anywhere that close. That meant there was a second gun.
There was another problem – too many bullets for one gun. Sirhan’s gun held eight rounds. Seven were removed from the victims alone. LAPD determined that an eighth bullet was embedded in the ceiling.
No one accounted for the bullet holes in the doorframe where RFK’s party had entered the pantry. Photographs taken by the FBI, LAPD, and AP show apparent bullet holes, which were circled and initialed. The story was that these were “ricochets.”
Two police officers depicted in the photos reported an actual bullet embedded in the wood of the center door frame. Hotel waiter Martin Patrusky said that police officers told him that they had dug two bullets out of the center divider. FBI agent William Bailey, in the pantry within hours of the shooting, said he could see the base of the bullet in the center divider.
(LAPD crime photo)
Why would law enforcement cover up this evidence? It goes back to a longstanding relationship between the LAPD and the CIA. The CIA had a big conflict of interest in the RFK case, as we will see. The investigating team, Special Unit Senator, was run by a former CIA officer and embedded with this conflict of interest.
Sirhan’s court-appointed lawyer was Grant Cooper. He had the biggest case of his life. But there was the biggest problem of all. Cooper was fatally compromised.
Cooper was on one of the defense teams in the Friar’s Club scandal case. One of the defendants was Johnny Roselli, a mobster deeply linked over the years to the death of JFK. The CIA had relied on Roselli to assassinate Fidel Castro during the early sixties, but he wasn’t able to get it done.
When Jack Kennedy was killed, the CIA went to great lengths to hide from the Warren Commission the plans to kill Castro. That was a door that the Agency wanted to keep shut. They knew it might lead to close scrutiny. Johnny Roselli was already trying to beat the rap with a little blackmail. He was letting high government officials know that “Kennedy tried to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.” The Castro story didn’t go public until 1975.
Bobby wanted to solve Jack’s murder, but knew he’d need the powers of the Presidency in order to do it.
One day grand jury papers were found on Cooper’s desk at counsel table, possibly planted there, perhaps by Roselli himself. Release of grand jury documents without the permission of the court is a felony.
Cooper was looking at a possible indictment. He could have lost his license to practice law. The matter was left pending for the duration of the Sirhan trial.
Cooper was not about to be a hero. He convinced Sirhan to not challenge the events in the pantry. The door frames were not admitted into evidence. Cooper based Sirhan’s defense on “diminished capacity,” arguing simply that Sirhan’s mind was weak.
No one wanted to cut the man caught alive any slack. Sirhan got the death penalty, later reduced to life with the possibility of parole. The door frames were destroyed. Cooper got a $1000 fine.
But a lot can still be learned about what happened in the pantry. Modern day acoustics tests indicate thirteen shots. Who was Sirhan with in the weeks before the shooting? It is not too late to determine his accomplices, or how Sirhan lost parts of his memory.
In the last few years, Dr. Daniel Brown of Harvard Medical School spent over sixty hours with Sirhan trying to recover his memory of the shooting. Dr. Brown concluded Sirhan’s amnesia for events before and during the shooting was real. Brown’s findings were ignored by the parole board. Sirhan has a strong case for parole. No prison violations since 1972. An excellent work record.
Although the politicians finally seem to agree that it is time to drastically reduce the prison population, those eligible for parole have an incredibly difficult time getting out. Isn’t it time to release him, so we can put together the story for ourselves before it’s too late?
Sirhan’s next parole hearing is Wednesday, February 10. For more on the campaign for his release, visit www.sirhanbsirhan.com.
obby Kennedy was shot to death 48 years ago. Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted for his murder, doesn’t remember anything about that night. But he does know things about the past. His parole hearing is February 10. What can he say?
The Most Revolutionary Act 