Get ready.
Hey, August twenty seven, twenty twenty five, allegedly, according to that thing we call a calendar and whatever might pop up on your computer, it is Wednesday, and it's the middle of the week, and I'm glad to have Larry Hancock with me. Now I did want Larry last week, but he was busy, and besides, things were crazy, So things happen anyway. Larry. Of course, if you go to
Larrydshancock dot com you can check out his blog. There will be links in the show notes to be able to follow up on that, and god knows what else. Because we're having a different sort of discussion tonight, I'll
begin it like this. The Kennedy Center. I noticed there's some goings on over there, And look, I don't care about your politics, but you would think that when you're talking about the forming arts, and that's what the center is for, that that's what they would be concerned with, not the politics of whatever, except maybe the politics of performing arts, which there are politics seemingly in everything. But does that count for maintaining the integrity of an institution?
Now I bring up the Kennedy Center because well, you know, anything that hasn named Kennedy and it catches my attention. Duh, it's just the way it works. But also because I have a reverence for art, but I also have a reverence for history, and I recognize the need for museums. And I know the type of people that undermine, destroy, restrict, and remove museums from a landscape. It's because they don't want the truth of history told, because they want to
give you their version of it. Now, we all know that thector does write the history. After all, the defeated don't often have the ability to record their side of the story. But if one takes in the whole of a historical situation, they might be able to learn about the vanquished, the defeated, the oppressed, and etc. In some ways, maybe through the lens of the victor, because the victor survives long enough to put up the institution and present
it as something educational. And believe me, education goes on all the time, whether it's I think a new term should be miseducation instead of you know, like there's information, there's misinformation, there's education, there's mis education. Well, maybe there's a better term for that, And I'm sure Larry Hancock can help me out with it, because that's part of what we're going to talk about tonight. Why well, you know,
one of the pinnacles in my mind whole life. I mean, it's even part of our language to bring up certain institutions as the place, the one place where you know this or that is going on, like dishonesty. You know that's DC. I mean, that's all there is to it. You know, corrupt cops. A lot of people would think la first, but I mean it's just the way of things. It makes it into the lexicon because it has a
basis in reality. And I don't know, I've always thought of a place like the Smithsonian as one of those places that's above the fray, that's above the ever changing. It needs a new face once in a while, but the information that's retained in it should only be added to as new discoveries are made. Sure, But is it being politicized? Is it being manipulated for people's comfort? Is it being up? And I've watched that happen a lot
when it comes to JFK stuff, et cetera. And Larry, I bet you've seen it a whole lot more in the JFK world. When people make adjustments and sometimes you see adjustments because new information came into existence, and other times you see adjustments being made because well it's convenient, or it fits their new movie, or it fits their new book, or it goes along with something prescribed in one way or another. Think about when something is prescribed, right,
if you scribe, what are you doing? You're writing, or you're accounting for recording. And if you do it ahead of time, you did it ahead of time. Anyway, all of that strange rant to introduce Larry Ancock and to give you a vague idea about what we're going to discuss tonight. First though, Larry, how you doing.
I'm doing good, Chuck. We've had a little coal front. I'm through. We've had some rain so on Oklahoma. It's a lot better August than it has been, kind of a precursor to fall. Not quite an early fall yet, but this time of the year when it can be one hundred and ten, having it be in the seventies for a day or so makes everybody a lot, puts them in a better humor. So I'm good.
Oh yeah, look two days here in the extremely hot and sweaty southeast and tell you the truth. It well, it eased up a bit past couple of days only, which I was surprised at because August is usually nothing but brutal here. But look, changing weather is one thing, and changing people and indeed generations go by. But certain
things do stand, you know for a while. I mean, I know, our country isn't that old, but certain institutions I don't know, they seem to be outside of the winds of change can be changed by, like I said, new information, new discoveries, new methodologies, et cetera. And I always think of certain places as repositories of that information.
The Library of Congress is another great example, right, isn't that like the largest collection of literature on the planet except for what we don't know about in the battles of the Vatican. Really, I mean, you know, here we go. These should be prideful things because of their well, their educational value. That has nothing to do with who's in charge, who got voted for, what the current trends are, et cetera.
Or am I just crazy? I mean, is this just you know, one of those I don't understand the culture and the meaning of tradition, et cetera. I think there's something to be said for that, but what are your thoughts on that?
And you've got to put a stake in the ground in some areas. It's just like an example would be if you're going to be using statistics and metrics on the economy, there's got to be a stake in the ground that says that's outside the political process because political decisions will be made on it. So it's got to be done outside of political control. If you put statistics in charge of a particular party or particular administration, you're
looking at grave consequences down the road. So data, i'd say, that's one place where you've got to put a stake in a ground. You can't. You've got to collect data in a neutral fashion, which quite frankly, is what science is all about. And although I'm not a fan of a lot of things that go on in academity academia, data integrity is one thing you know that's that's required for science, and it's required for vision making, decision making, and that's one place you've got to put a stake
in the ground. The other place you got to put a stake in the ground is for history. You have to put a stake in the ground because you're going to be making decisions for the future based on what you see in the past. But if you start rewriting that history, if you start spinning it for political purposes, then your decisions will go bad too. So Jack I say, my first response is institutionally as a country, as a nation, or as any group quite frankly doesn't even have to
be at that level. If you can't put a stake in ground for your data collection, and you can't put a stake in the ground for your history, you're going to start making mistakes and you're going to pay for them. And if that sounds hard nosed, well, yep, that's what it is.
Well, some people would say, Larry that look, not everything's so black and white with this, because there are focuses, And that's true. There are focal points. There are things that are made more important. You know, we don't preserve the poetry from everyone who writes a poem, right, we don't preserve the history of oh, I don't know the papers of every person who was like a member of
the town council. Necessarily, there's a level of importance, there's a level of impact where we have to preserve, say, you know, presidential papers because they are an important figure in the government, in policy, in culture, in the reality
as it's being shaped. That's an important figure. This is why you're supposed to retain all the presidential papers, whatever they are, right, stuff like this, So is there a priority in collection that is maybe really the argument that some people are trying to make or are they just
doing what they do with everything nowadays? And you know, we went from f your feelings to whatever your feelings are, that's what reality is, which is kind of a strange twist because I thought that was the liberal thing to do, but now it's not. It doesn't matter liberal conservative. When people get power, they seem to behave differently than when
they were the minority. And this is why it's so difficult and so necessary to have a neutral gathering place where you say, look, maybe the liberals papers aren't important, but the conservatives are, or the conservatives papers are just stupid. You know, we need to go with the progressive stuff and save that. The priority here is not about that. It's about there is a way to set priorities here.
But it's not about your feelings. It's not about what you like, it's not about the persuasion you prefer is it.
It's a matter and this really, it really doesn't need to be a batter debate. It's been established over and over again that there are a set of best practices and those really are beyond debate. I mean thousands of hours of headswead have gone into determining what best practices should be in data collection. As I mentioned, that's where i'd set one of my mistakes. You know, you collect data in a certain way for it to be considered credible. If you don't follow those sorts of best practices, then
it's not credible, it's not reliable. It has to do with how you collect it, how you vet your sources. And that's pretty well laid out by this point in time. You know that's been done enough with enough critique to know what works and what doesn't work because it can be judged like if we follow these practices, we know we get good data because the data allows us to make good decision. It works same thing in history. Again, there's no big surprise here. There best practices in history.
You can go to a graduate history history class and go through them, and it's a matter. One simple rule is primary sources You always use primary sources. If we were talking about slavery, slavery at the Smithsonian, I don't care who what anybody now thinks. What did these slaves think about it? We have lots of collections of verbal collections, and we have written collections from them. What did they think about it? How did they feel about it? What
did they feel about the practices? What did these slave owners feel about the practices. That's the way you present the history of slavery well. And you don't get to make the call whether it's good or bad. It was their decision as to whether it was good or bad. You don't get to reverse engine hear that, well.
Right, And here's where I'm going to take a swipe at, you know, one of the liberal popular positions from recently, and why it needs to be swiped at. When you look at slavery, Yeah, you can't just turn your head away because you find it repugnant. You need to look at the business of it. Indeed, you need to look at what those practices were, What kind of paperwork needed to be kept, what were the prices, what drove the market? All of these things are relevant to the way that
practice was conducted. You might not like it. You might not want to look at how much was a human being worth and why, but it was a reality. So it needs to be examined and we need to understand it, I think fully and thoroughly. And yeah, I did just boil it down to what about the business practices because that is highly relevant in the history. Or am I you know? Am I just blowing smoke about this or what it is?
And that's why you need to look at what the people said about it. And I'll give a very painful example from my personal history that deals with what you just described, Chuck. I had relatives living in Texas at the time of the Civil War who were slave owners. I have letters that they wrote. One of those letters is from one of them who was in the Confederate Army who wrote back and said, we're going to lose you need to sell the slaves. And the slaves were
sold not too long after that. And this is all in a series of correspondents. The slaves were sold, but not too long after the end of the war, they were back as individuals, as freemen. Okay, they could come or go at their own will. So we've had a big change in morality A big change in you know, the personal side of the equation. But those same individuals were back working for my relatives as freemen. They could make their own decision, and their own decision had been okay,
I was okay working for these people. I'm freed, I need a job. I'm going to go back to work for them. So that melds together the equation of the reality of making a living with the sea change that really occurred. They made the decision to go back, and I think that's the one of the big things that you you miss if you don't get down deep in the reality of the situation. It was their morals and their ethics, but there the big change was before they
had no free will, they were slaves. Afterwards they put themselves back in the same situation of their own free will. And that that kind of package is the whole thing for you. It tells you that you know it was. It was certainly bad when they didn't have free will, but the economics of the situation and the relationship they had made that the place they went preferred to go get a job afterwards, and they got paid differently than they had been before. So it's it's a complex thing.
But I would that's where I submit. It's not my call on that. I can't. If I did not have that correspondence that relates that story, I probably have a different impression with Wolf's what was going on at the end of the Civil.
War, all right, And Texas is immensely a dynamic and complex in that story, because look, there's a reason why there's one star on the flag of Texas, and it's because it was the Republic of Texas at one point. I think, and now I may be rusty on my Civil War history here a little bit, but I think there was a certain point at which Texas wasn't necessarily
committed to one side or the other. I don't think they were part of the first people that you know, joined the the secession, if you will, And that may have been for a variety of factors, and all of that dynamic needs to be recognized here. When did Texas actually enter into the Confederacy? Not everybody decided on one day, even though there was, you know, that circumstance, and that changed things in the reality of the people you're talking about in your own personal history. If the state of
Texas was in was in they were in. If they weren't going to be in. They weren't going to be in And there were even you know, slaves being held in other places that didn't necessarily join right away in the Civil War and quotes right in exactly the same fashion, it wasn't necessarily homogeneous clean action that occurred all on one day.
And there's it wasn't homogeneous between North and South either, right. If you really look at the history at the times, you find you find a lot of opposition to slave holding in the North, but a lot of you know, just the opposite. There were strong contingents in the Midwest. Actually during the war, the South was successful and in a lot of sabotage operations because they had supporters in
the Midwest, in Illinois, in Indiana, in New York City. Right, things were the things that were imposed on the Northern States. We were very strong from a security standpoint, a lot of a lot of pretty brutal methods going on because there was support. But of course the same as due in the South. You know, Texans being pretty independent, were not necessarily all for just jumping into the game on anybody side. So you know, it's a complex story. But
back to the point I mean, you can't. You need doing historical practices that you don't get into the complexity of the situation and you don't see it correctly. You can't. You can't overwrite it. You have to look at the primary sources. What were those people saying. And that's where I get back to the argument about how it's being presented. It's not my call as to how it's being presented.
Is is their story being presented? Is there is their story being presented in full and equitably and without anybody making it match how they want it to read. You know, your displays should be real. It should be real photographs, real letters, real audible interviews. We have a lot there's a large amount of anthropology that's been done in this country over the over the centuries, actually with the indigenous Americans to capture their side of the story, with with
the slaves. You know, that's what needs that's the history. So my call of anybody going there is a pitchmark. It is not to get back to what you were saying earlier. I can look at it and say are you following the best practices or are you not liberal conservative? Whatever you want to be. I can say, are you following the correct practices to tell the story in a neutral historical fashion.
Well because otherwise, look, if you leave it to the narrative devices of people that are going to be influenced
by only their own perspective. You know, you could turn around and say, you know, my family had these people that they fed and clothed, you know, without charging them any money in exchange for a bit of help, you know, doing whatever it was they were doing, And you could turn it into that, and you end up with a tone def a statement like oh it was like job training, you know, yeah, and we will that the politics.
They needed work and I helped them out. Yeah, okay, they just couldn't leave when they wanted to. It's kind of like indentures. Right, It's amazing to me that we missed the whole point. An indentured servitude gets down to the point with like, I'm always stunned by the fact that did you folks realize that Benjamin Franklin escaped from his indentured servitude. He left and stole away. And you know this is Benjamin Franklin, right, because he was financially enslaved.
He could not leave that job. But yeah he did and he got a ship in the darken night to a different colony.
Right, which almost exactly is. And there were rules, by the way, this is another thing. There were rules in different places, and they called them, you know, the code Noir in some places right where there were standards by which you were supposed to handle your slaves, just like you know, and I hate to put it this way, but there are standards by which you're supposed to handle your livestock. There are standards by which you're supposed to handle other things, and even if they were five eighths
of a human being and everything. Look, I'm kicking a lot of emotional tires here, I know I am. But the point is all of them need to be recorded because that gives you a sense of the actual transactions and institution that it was. Right. I mean, you picked this, okay, and you picked one of the hardest things to have
to be honest about and be objective about. When recording everything, you got to record it all, and yes, that includes recording the brutality, the dehumanization, et cetera, all of it, all of it. That's how you're ever going to have a chance to be able to examine that history correctly or am I missing your point now?
And you I think you're making a good point there, because you've got it's got to be the full history, right, it can't just be a slice of the history. And you know, we talked about this earlier and this you know, it's it's not that this is Yeah, there's a real problem with how we present this in our national institutions, because our national institutions really should be above political control.
Anybody that thinks differently, I'm sorry, I disagree. You know, you've got to have if you're going to be a democratic nation, you've got to have someplace where you draw the line over political control. But this, this does impinge even on the work that we do in our research. And I think I mentioned this earlier, Chuck, and that that's that's one of the things that we we run into in our research of conspiracies and and and things get really complicated, is where you only you took the
view that somebody else had expressed. And I'm going to go ahead and relate what I've just been through. Everybody that's listening this probably knows that David Boylan and I have recently published a book on only Harvey Oswald. And I've had to recant in several areas where I took other people's words for it, who I thought had trusted, you know, and found out later that maybe they didn't have the full picture. We have a fuller picture now,
So some of my views have changed. And sometimes you need to post a notice that says, oh, by the way, you know what was up here. You know ten years ago we changed. Don't be shocked. Here's why we changed it, you know, because we found something new. Yeah, that could be rather innocent, like renaming a dinosaur, or it could be something more sensational about it. We found a skeleton for President's closet. And okay, we need to tell this
part of the story. But in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald, I had written there'd been a letter that Lee Harvey Oswald had written to the Communist Party USA in the summer of nineteen sixty three, and in part of that letter, in a couple of sentences, he talks about asking for vice this when he if he should go underground. Now that's a pretty pretty strong thing, you know, and can be easily sensationalized if you just took that part of it, Okay, which I did, because that suggests a lot of different
things that might be going on. When I got a chance to read the fully redacted and released letter recently unreducted, sorry,
unredacted letter recently, it's a different story. And what the full story is that Lee Harvey Oswald had been after he had done his leaf living and his ro tests for Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, he'd been on the radio in a debate and really gotten pretty well trashed in the debate because they surprised him and pulled out the fact that he had been in the Soviet Union, he had said bad things about the United States, he married a Russian wife, he believed in Marxism.
He wanted to talk about Castro and the success of Cuban Revolution, the social progress in Cuba, and they blindsided with him with that, and it really really was a pretty He did is pretty well with it, but the problem is the people that were debating really cast a lot of doubt on him and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee because of his association with it. Right in this letter, he is.
Right, yeah, really quickly though, I would say that even you have to parse this out further because ed Butler did an interview with him that radio show called Latin Listening Post, and that interview was not as confrontational as the later what was it, conversation carte blanche they called it, I believe, which included Berengere, you know, the Ed Butler one on one pretty much let Oswald set out some things without being challenged too much. Butler was.
Kind of set him up for the second one. It's kind of like, well, that wasn't bad, Let's go on this the next show, and then wham right.
But that was My point is that literally, you need to examine both of those things separately. And somebody might have just heard you put them both together and say that they were okay, But yeah, see what I mean, you got to look at both of these things separately. I'm not saying this to you, Larry, you know this, but I mean my point is that you take a look at the Ed Butler. You listen to it yourself. I've listened to it, I don't know how many times.
But the point is that it's not very confrontational. It appears as though, yeah, that's what it sounds like, he's being set up. But either way, if you don't want to talk about the intent. What you can say is that his points of view were not challenged Bill and Gehre was added to the next interview, and he was used as a foil while the interviewer was also challenging him. So literally, he was being challenged from two different directions.
In the next interview, that is a completely different conversational dynamic where he trips over himself. He says, Oh, I'm not a Communist, but I'm a Marxist lendedness, and they ask him what that means, and he goes into a thing about well, they make so many TVs here and so many people have so many phones there, and it just it becomes this convoluted mess because he does not know how to defend himself. He was blindsided by it, like you said, obviously, and was that the point of it? Well,
here we go. You have to examine the history and now take a look at what he does afterwards. And it happens to be this letter, which was always represented as very strange because Oswald did not have, as far as we know, an official you know, membership with the Communist Party of the United States, right, he did not have an official membership with the fair Play for Cuba Committee either, Right, So all of these things need to be mentioned and need to be understood when you're examining
just this particular piece of correspondence and what inspired it or what it came before it. Right, So I'm just saying for the purposes of context, like you do for me all the time. Isn't that correct? Oh?
Absolutely? And when you understand that he had just had he had felt good about himself and what he was doing after that first radio show, as you say, and then he came out the second one shell shocked, and literally he starts again writing several people Socialist Workers Party CPS, and he's writing them saying, you know, I'm even thinking of moving back to your area. Could I volunteer and work on your paper? Could I help you? You can see he's kind of going through a trauma. And in
the letter he's literally saying. What he's saying is he doesn't just say go underground. What he says first is should I lower my profile? Go underground? Because I realized that what I'm doing, the way I'm doing it might actually make the fair Play for Cuba Committee look bad. You know, he actually says, I'm concerned that people might use me and my background to make the FPCC and the Cuban Revolution look bad, and I'm not feeling good about that. Should I change the way? Should I change
what I'm doing? Which is a totally different interpretation of what's going on if you have that full context and the full letter, because he is literally going on to say, you know, I'm looking for advice, which is not the classic Oswal. Up to that point in time. Oswell always
ran and ran his own game. He's pretty headstrong. But now he's had to suck it up and realize that maybe the way he's been doing things isn't maybe he's going to have to make a change, and he's becoming much more notional at that point in time, which is
really important for understanding Oswal and what happens next. But I guess back to the point of this story is if you didn't have the context for it, and you don't have the full letter, just quoting oswal Is asking the Communist Party about going underground makes it a lot more sensational, a lot more suspicious, a lot more suspect, which is the way I wrote it up in my book. And now he needed to take it back and you need to be honest about that in history, which is
why historians peer review each other. And that's another thing that I wanted to bring up about putting stakes in the ground. Best practices don't mean even one historian's take on something. The important thing is to let them beat each other up. See what comes out of it. Get the historians that know the subject. If you're going to put up something as a not a primary source, but something that's been written about it, and you're doing it in an institution, even in a museum, it needs to
give references. It's like for the full story in this, read this and read this. We have this in the bookstore, and we have two different versions in the bookstore. Read them and see what you think. That's the way to go about being institutionally neutral and really truly following best practices. If you just got one book on the subject, or a controversial subject, okay, not do you call a dinosaur
an aptosaurus or a bronosaurus? Okay, you only have one book there, But if on slavery, you might want to have a couple of different views from professional historians. So back to our larger topic of you know, where do you put your sakes and ground and what do you do as far as institutional history. You do it the right way. Otherwise you politicize it and you just cut your legs out from under yourself.
Well, absolutely true. And the other thing that I've noted over the years is sometimes, you know, if you allow ego to be the driving force and only accept the narrative coming from somebody's ego, that doesn't want to be wrong because then you know, oh, gee, I sold you on something. I told you, I had the answers, and now I have to say I'm wrong. There's a serious reluctance about that, but that is part of the process. People are gonna get things wrong. This is not you know, like, oh,
Larry failed on this. I didn't fail. He just made an error that needed to be corrected, and quite frankly, is probably kind of happy that it was corrected because now a more accurate assessment can be made. Like, for instance, you know, it's still weird to me that he's going to the Communist Party when he doesn't have an affiliation with them, though, you know, so somebody could say, well, why is he doing that when he's this headstrong guy.
Normally that seems to think he knows better than everybody in there. I mean, if you listen to Ruth Pain right and other people that you know did actually have proximity to him.
Uh.
And I'm not saying that Ruth pain is my primary source on this, but does seem as though the guy was pretty confident in most of his actions. Now all of a sudden, we have a written record here of him approaching, you know, people that he doesn't necessarily know personally, but asking for advice because they might be an authority. I think the same kind of thing actually happened when he asked for John apt to be his lawyer right in Dallas, because it just happened to be an authority
figure he knew of. And so now we see a different aspect where he might reach out to someone that he believes as an authority, whether he has a personal interaction with them or not. And we have a different dynamic emerging here where there might be other pieces of evidence here where he reaches out to somebody who is an authority on things in his mind. Whether that's you know, the way it should have gotten Yeah, good.
I think it's very important insight, Chuck, because what we do know is that he very He subscribed to and very regularly read the publications from cp US at the Worker and from Socialist Work, so he would read them. He didn't, he didn't. He he wrote back and forth to the Socialist Workers Party more and it had written to young as a young socialist. But the dynamic is usually he would read things. He would read his own
decisions and not ask for a lot of advice. Okay, yeah, you're absolutely right, as the mor George de Morangehaw would say, as his friends would say, even to the you know, he would make up his online based on what he was reading. But what we see happening in New Orleans puts him in That's why I said, a much more notional state. He's beginning to question whether everything that he's
doing is the right way to go about it. It's not producing the read and and the other thing that's coming up, quite frankly is Oswald has never been totally an island to himself. You know, he he would he likes to if he can find people to talk to that believe the same thing, he will talk to them. In New Orleans, we know he went to address the Jesuit College and that's some very positive feedback and that
he liked that. So he will also face the fact that in New Orleans he's not finding a lot of people. There's no George de Morenshield, there's nobody that can even accept his progressive notions. So there's there's some reason to think he's looking for a little bit more dialogue with with somebody, which would be a recent kind of like I'm going to go back to the East Coast and you know, actually go to work with these people and they'll talk to you know, and not throw things at me.
So it's he is, he is evolving at that point in time, and that's a very important thing to pick up on because we do see sort of a sea change, and that's an oswell and Oswell asking for advice is new.
It's new, it's new, but it's not inconsistent here. And this is why if you just take what Larry just said, Look, he's being informed. His worldview is being informed by the communist publications. Okay, so whatever you want to say, he was regularly reading them as far as we know from the monitoring of his mail from him holding it up
in the backyard photos. Whatever you want to say, it does seem as though his worldview was at least partially informed by these papers, right, So of course that would make sense that his worldview is informed that way. He thinks that he might have slipped up here a bit. Let me check with the people who have informed my worldview to see if there's another direction to go. There's a logic here, Larry, that I'm seeing, you know, just
from listening to you. I mean, it actually makes more sense now when we had just the should I go underground? Seems like a rather drastic thing to ask somebody you don't know, you know, I mean, it is a bit much, But we did take it like that for years. We did, you know, the people that wanted to make him the kooki kami, you know, Loan Nut especially love that. You know, look at him, he's a comedy. He's asking him should
he go underground? See? See he's shifty, shady. Okay. But if you put it in a greater context and you think about you know, listen, if there is a source where your worldview is being shaped by that source, you might consult somebody there and say, hey, you know, someone wrong here a little bit with my worldview and trying to express it. You might go back to what it is that informed you, or who it is that informed you, or the publication that informed you. Reread your stuff? Did
I miss something? Is there something else I should be able to do? Since you're telling us this part of the story, you must know more. I'm just saying it does. It's got logic to it. It's got a logic to it that you know, isn't kooky and isn't you know, drastic and out of left field?
Uh? And and I think it tells us to two more things. One is again, Oswell is not nearly a straight line as we would like. He's not just just one track, never varies from that tract. He can even have self doubt. And in this instance that self doubt is very important because when you're reading the letter and you're going Oswald is really saying, you know, people might take this and use my backstory to actually attack the fair play for community and detact you know, the revolution
in Cuba. And he's saying that, you know, people might do that. He is self aware enough without knowing it to know exactly at that time in New Orleans is beginning to prepare a package based around that second radio debate and they'll be working on that package, and we don't know exactly when it was available. But at the same time Oswald is wondering about could somebody use this
against me? For sure, INCA and very possibly Special affairs staff in Miami are taking that to begin a propaganda program built around the Harvey Oswald, and Oswald is smart enough to realize that that could happen, and he's beginning to back out of it because he realizes the implications. And that's a much brighter and more situationally aware Oswald than we have thought about in the past.
And it makes more sense now that the media was instantly informed about this stuff because remember this is still localized, you know, in national broadcasts are not calm, and you know in nineteen sixty three, okay, so you know it. Just because ABC News in Laws in New Orleans or whatever had it doesn't mean that every ABC News had it. You know what I'm saying, I used ABC as an example.
I'm not saying that's specific. What I'm saying is that instantaneously after his name was known and a couple of biographical facts were known, our media, even in that day and age when we didn't have the instantaneous transmissions of things. Already had clips from these radio shows, these audios instantaneously, and it seems like that was ready to be distributed pretty quickly, and it was something that somebody was aware
would be useful at some point. So you know right there, you know that, like you're saying, look, they were preparing packets because you know, maybe explaining what INCA was doing because a lot of people, you know, they know it sort of, but could you just give you know, a bullet point on inco what that was and why that's important, why they would have been interested in this specific situation.
ETHA was a very interesting organization, and I think there's a case that could be made with documents that we have now. ECO was one of those anti communist groups, very very right ring, very anti communists that had been organized and founded by a fellow in New Orleans who had been a PR specialist. He was a public relations specialist, that was his business, and he was strongly anti communist and felt that the Communists were really a lot better at pop propaganda in PR than we were, that they
were telling their story better. Yeah, State Department did some things, you know, the CIA did some things, but you know, the Communist Party out of Soviet Union in particular, was so skilled and the fishing that they were telling their story around the world a lot better than we were telling our story. And he had founded a couple of small organizations that began to craft, you know, anti commun
stories and circulate them. And then he got some major financial support from a fellow named Aushner in New Orleans who was very well known throughout the Caribbean. He had a clinic treated a lot of government officials from different Central American and Latin American countries and was quite wealthy,
and he funded ECO with a lot of money. And so they started doing you know, a lot of really well done pr It's very clear that actually one of the best things, the most effective things they did, were a series of truth tapes. And those truth tapes were interviews with Cuban expatriots, Cuban refuses who had terrible stories to tell about the Castro regime, the appropriation of properties, executions.
And now we know that a lot of those people were pointed towards Eca from the CIA and that he worked with the CIA, and the CIA also helped distribute those truth tapes to their outlets, their deniable outlets in Central America. So ECLO was closely connected to the CIA for propaganda purposes. And so when you're looking at that,
it really raises the question. It's kind of like, well, if he knows and Econ knows how to make you know the best of Lee Harvey Oswell's you know, efforts in New Orleans, is there anybody in Miami that's thinking about doing the same thing. A lot to be explored there. David Boyle and I are exploring that and doing some research. But ECA is just EGA is kind of a clue as to the kind of propaganda that the CIA may have been thinking about in regard to Lee Harvey Oswell.
Because based on Jeff Morley's work and the recent documents that we now know that everybody at Special Affairs Staff in d C in Miami, SaaS Miami Operating based JM Way, they all knew about Oswell. They all knew about Oswald.
Is the rest confrontation. They were all aware of what propaganda that had already been done with this radio broadcast, and it's almost impossible to think that they could see how effective that that radio interview had been that you had described and that they would not want to take advantage of it in some fashion.
Well, and here's the thing, multiple things can be true at the same time where the CIA could work in support of INCA. Whether it was organically created or not doesn't matter, because either way it would be advantageous to
at least exploring how to utilize that information. And even in the post assassination, immediate post assassination media frenzy, where every magazine and a lot of television and a lot of radio was devoted to the assassination in the immediate way, okay, not long after, INCA literally produces records Oswald Speaks or
something they called it. I've seen it before. I owned a beat up copy at one time, and it's literally if you look at the back of the you know, the LP jacket, Uh, yes, it's Oswald's interview And there you go. It's produced by INCA. Now they're not a record company, and they yeah, sorry.
They did it in English and in Spanish.
Yes, they do.
That matter, which is very interesting. And yeah, there's there's a lot that we can be learned when you start we start mapping out about who knew what about oz Will when that was denied. All this time. You know, now that we know that so much of that was was taken out of the record, people didn't talk about what they knew. You know, we can start to reverse engineer some of what might have been going on, because otherwise it's just piece bits and pieces laying around and
you go, you know, that's strange, that's anomalous. But we can't connect those bits and pieces. And now I think we have a better chance of doing it now that we realize the information that was in circulation about Oswald that everybody wanted to deny and get out of the record, brings a whole new you know, we all thought that might be true. Now we know it's true.
And this also speaks to the you know, the post assassination narrative, because that was managed obviously, and some people would say it was managed for the reason that you know, Johnson gave to h you know, to Warren or Warren in the first place, you know, put your uniform back on. You got to prevent a nuclear war because the commedies
did it well, you know, is that legitimate or not. Anyway, it had to be managed, and part of the management would be managing the information about Oswald, making sure certain things got out there. Who knows even distributed. How does an organization like income Excuse me, just because I've been sick a little lately, I am sorry about that. I didn't mean to call at you. How does an organization
like INCA even get to distribute a record? Somebody wanted to help with that, Okay, you don't distribute record distribution at that time. There was something to be said for that, okay. So they either volunteered to help out INCA, an organization that maybe not everybody in the world knew about in nineteen sixty three sixty four, you know, they wanted to help them distribute a record. They got these things, the record stores made sure it was produced in English and Spanish,
the production was done here. That wasn't something that was easily done.
You know.
Then all the way pretty much through the history of you know, vinyl and LPs, okay, there is something to be said about the organisms that had to come together and coalesce to even put that record out. So from the time it was recorded to the time it was broadcast, or when it was broadcast slash recorded to the time it's distributed later, all of these things can be revelatory if we know the information, who helped, why, who suppressed
why so? And here's me again trying to step back and take the objective point of view, because this will show you something, and you can only do that if you're not hunting after it with a prescribed agenda. Again, it doesn't matter. Forget about the politics I brought up, liberal, conservative, blah blah blah. The labels and language have shifted a bit. Forget that. If we just go with I believe Oswald did it, I believe Oswald didn't.
Do it, it.
Doesn't really matter. You can reveal the whole history. If we can take in the whole history of the circumstance and show it for what it is, and you don't have to believe anything, because if we actually get it all, you might be able to parse it out for yourself, if we can actually examine the entirety of the record. I'm using just this example because it's it's a good one.
It's got a real time circumstance, it's got a preassassination circumstance all evolving around the assassination, and one of the key figures in the discussion anyway of the assassination, and it's got a posthumous traveling record afterwards too, So to me that's most interesting, And if you take it all apart, you might get a chance to figure out what actually happened to you, you know, because some people have said, look, these people were CIA people. They were behaving like they
cared about you know, Central and South America. But really they were just CIA operatives. And well, okay, so was Oswald a CIA operative? Yes, well why are they working against each other? Then, you know, like, you can't just dismiss it with one of those sweeping statements, and especially you can't do that unless you've dug into all of the circumstances. Like I said, consider what it would take
to distribute a record for INCA. This is not you know, Atlantic Records, This is not you know, Chess Records, This is not this is a company that's not in the business of doing this, but somehow managed to do that. Maybe looking into that would be interesting as well. I mean, now you have to actually look at all of it and look at the circumstances of the time that have nothing to do with it. What would it take to make that record and distribute it? These are fair questions.
Clearly, you didn't put it into Spanish just because you wanted to distribute it in the US. There's always an intention to take it much more broadly into Latin America, you know, and that's going to be expensive and among the things. And now we can tell.
The whole story of how the CIA was set up to distribute that kind of aial to its own deniable outlets, its own foreign basically media network.
We know that the person that was in charge of doing that was David Phillips out of Mexico City, which
brings some more interesting things into the conversation. But in the line of our overall thought it it all comes back to something simple as if if you don't have if you don't present the full primary data, if you can't see the full primary data, if somebody doesn't show you all of the primary data, then by human nature, you're liable to make what you can see fit what you want to see, which is a sin that I
committed when I just saw Underground. Oh okay, that none of us are immune for that, and we've got to watch ourselves. So there's a warning there. If you again, if you don't put those stakes in the ground, you start saying you set your filters. We all have filters, and your filters go to work, and if you limit the information coming into the filter, it makes it even worse.
Well, and the other point you made about peer review, look, not every peer is equal. That's true. But you know what, if you don't have things tested, and I'm telling you that that's gonna be something I'm going to do at Lancer this year is pretty much say look, test it all about what I'm going to tell you here. I want you to go and prove me wrong. Please add to my knowledge if you can. I want that. I actually appreciate that part of the process. I don't think
it's a negative. Some people say, well, oh, you made mistakes in your book. Sometimes there are our mistakes. You know. A good, very smart friend of mine once made a mistake in the very first sentence of his book that he showed me after he already had him printed up, And I said, I wish you had shown that to me in the first place. There are mistakes, But Larry's laugh and I think he knows I'm talking about anyway. The point is you can make a mistake like that.
Anybody can. But when you put these things out, I mean look, I'd prefer to give people the basis to prove something wrong and expand the general knowledge, because that's what it's actually all about. At the end of all of this, this discussion about who found something, who missed something,
or anything else. Ultimately, the goal of the historian should be to refine the record with new information, with better information, with more complete information, with newly discovered things, or maybe some things that were already there but having been ignored previously. And I think that should be the goal for everybody.
Revision should not ever be seen as a defeat, but should be seen as evolution of the thing we're all after, which is the most truthful and accurate portrait of the historical event, time period, people, person, business, whatever it may be. And politicizing this is going to do nobody any favors, no matter what your point of view is. I mean, that's the ultimate conclusion to tonight's discussion. In my mind, Larry,
that's where we should be. But by all means, if you have a different way of putting it, or you think we need to add to that, you know we can close it out. On your final thoughts here about this.
I think you put that very well I don't really have any any final thought other than if you make it what you want it to be, or if you contaminate your primary sources, you're fooling yourself. And okay, it's one thing to do it for yourself, all right, But my point would be at the higher level that you do it. If you do it at the nation's primary national institutions, you didn't just fool yourself, you damage the whole society. So you've got to look at the You've
got to look at the consequences. You have to be much more demanding, which is why academia is more demanding, why peer reviews are brutal, and having been through a number of peer reviews, they are brutal. There it's like not something that life is. You don't do it because you want people to find things that are wrong, but you really don't want to write you know, you would
prefer they didn't, So you're subjecting yourself to that. But if at the national level, if you don't have that stake in the ground and go through the process, you're not just fooling yourself, you're fooling literally millions of people. And what's worse with social networking being what it is today. You're you're fooling. You're you're generating data that will feedback and make it worse and worse and worse. You'll get
further and further and further from the truth. We all know that when things get repeated, they generally don't get repeated right, and the story gets worse. We all played that game in school, you know, make a line and stay something. By the time he gets to the tenth person, it's something totally different. So the risk is even greater
now from an institutional and a social standpoint. So I guess I probably labor that point enough, but we you know, there are points places where you need to be squeaky clean and get above yourself, and that's one of them.
You know, one of the lesser known guys who really used to lecture me on the phone a lot. Do you remember Roger Remington? Oh yeah, he was historian, you know, and he was a professor at Aquinas College, a small college, you know, middle of the country kind of thing. And the brilliance that came from that guy is just it's
a gift that keeps on giving. He's passed away now quite a while, but I can never forget the stuff that this man you know, impressed upon me, gave me educations in some of those, you know, a couple hours phone calls, you know, sternly, very how would you put it in a very curt sort of way. He was
a little he was a little crusty as an old guy. Actually, okay, yeah, you talked to him, yeah, okay, yes, so you know, and he would lecture me about perspective and there was a French concept to that and how history could not be written until seventy five years after it occurred because there needed to be time for perspective, right, you know, the French. I'm butchering the French, but you know what
I'm getting at. And he said, you know, one of the problems that's going to continue to snowball from I'm paraphrasing the modern historical literature that occurs right after something happens. You know, a book gets written two years after something, a book gets written months after, et cetera, is that there is no time for a careful examination. And we're
going to see this problem speed up over time. We're going to see it increase in its velocity because the more people that get involved in it the more books that need to be get made, even though publishing is not necessarily the biggest business in the world at this point, and who the hell reads a book, clearly not a lot of people in power. The point is that we now live in an age where instant information is even worse than the stuff that used to take a couple
of years to publish. And it's still you know, it has a lot to do with the ethical and ethical considerations of the authors, and those very wildly you know, you tell me, not everyone is a historian, you know, even if they want to be. We could all contribute to the history, but we must be careful. And I think that you know, as I said before, it's the political considerations. All of that have nothing to do with
getting at the accurate portrait. You know, some people use the word truth and this and that, and then people want to convolude that and say, well, this is my truth, this is your truth, and no, there's only one way that things happen. There may be a lot of perspectives you can look at it from. You can catch it
from a bunch of different angles. And the more angles you get, and the more what would they call that panoramic view you can have of the circumstance, like I say, the time period, the business, the individual, the historical event, the better off you are, and those things will only come to us with time, one way or another. Now you have to wait for something to be a little less redacted, for you to be able to see something
a little differently. But that's not a mistake. That's part of the process, and all of that needs to be retained, doesn't it.
Yeah, we should. We should be warned what he was saying. It's sort of like, okay, we all know historians know that, Yeah, seventy five years is a good working number. And the thing was that used to be the publishing process. You know, you might see a book come out a year or two years after the fact, which we did with the Kennedy assassination, and you would really know that that was too early. But now it's so much worse. You can take any event that occurs today and there will be
I just look at some of the publishers. There'll be a book out on it, you know, out in four months. You know, something that looks like a book after four months, But that'll be lagging behind social media, which will have already covered the issue and resolved it, and people's position will have been taken within twenty four or forty eight hours. So things are getting worse if you don't follow the best, it's not getting better. His concerns that it would get worse are proven absolutely right.
And I mean he must have said that to me in the late nineties when the Internet was not what it is, and you know, well, maybe no, it was early two thousands. The latest that could have been is two thousand and three when he said that to me, and said it to me more than once. If you never heard of Roger Remington, by the way, I would suggest, if you're well read on the Kennedy assassination, a little something called Biting the Elephant. It's one of three or
four books that he put out very plain covers. He said he didn't care about getting readers for them, even because he was trying to publish things for other historians to pick up. Anyway, I leave it at that, Larry, And you know, I'm not trying to promote Roger's stuff. I mean, he's not going to make anything from it, and I don't think he made anything from it to
begin with. But he definitely gave me the ten plates to understand what it is we really should be doing with our best practices, or at least have a vague idea about it. I'm not even saying I know all that, but either way, these best practices are there for a reason, and they pre exist, you know, this little country of ours, our Library of Congress, all that, so you know there's a reason for it. Just saying anyway, Larrydashhandcock dot Com,
go there. I still highly recommend the Oswald Puzzle, and I can't wait to see what you and David do at Lancer this year. I think you're going to be one of several controversial presentations.
Maybe that's that's what we do.
It is what we do. I think I'm going to really aggravate people because I'm going to be in person, but you're going to be there virtually, and David will also be presenting with you. Not sure if he'll be virtual or in person just yet, but you know, if you keep up on the news there you'll find out. Also in the show notes, you'll see a link to l Answer in a discount code if you want to
attend in person or online. But that aside the link to Larry's book the Oswald puzzle, Larry's website, Larry's blog, always informative, always evolving, and you know, Larry has changed over the years as new information has become available, like a responsible person would do. And I I don't know what can I say? Larry is basically my favorite living historian. How about that? And I hope he is yours too. Anyway,
thanks Larry for doing this. I took you a little bit over, Sorry about that, but I think we got the message across. What do you say?
Oh yeah, definitely is something that needs to be said regardless, but just needed to be said. So thanks for the opportunity to do it.
Anytime, Larry. Of course, we'll try and speak to you again in two weeks, and who knows what will be happening then that we need to address. Hopefully nothing world ending, but you know, it is what it is. And if nothing else, maybe we'll talk about some more JFK stuff, or maybe we'll talk about some of these other documents that have been released or are yet to be released. I almost want to see what Larry thinks of the
Epstein thing. I don't know if you guys want to hear about that, or if Larry wants to speak about it, but be more than happy to take your feedback if you write to me at O'Kelly. You know, if you look at the email link on olly dot com, just click that, it'll give you the address. Whatever I am blind JFK researcher at gmail dot com. If you've got a pen and you want to write it down or you can remember it there, it is Larrydash Handcock dot com.
And I said, go ahead, call it the.
Truth about the day of Heay assassination.
Right, Well, what do you want to know?
Udy Baker's wild claim?
Oswald girlfriends you knew Ruby and Barry handswer weapons. Really, I imagine I could claim I have four wheels. It doesn't make me a wagon.
But okay, Oswald was on the building and I'm trying to prevent the murder of John Kennedy. Come on now, has a real effort on the day of pay assassination.
Book into claim.
Go to Amazon dot com enter Judith Baker in her own words. You'll get the results for a digital copy of a book where Walt Brown utilizes her own words and the known evidence in the cave to get at well a different perspective let's say you can get judithbary Baker in her own words from the author himself, signed if you request it by contacting doctor Brown at kias jfk at aol dot com. It's a fun book and
it actually dissects the many, many fantastic claims. Judith vary Baker in her own words, Thank you information.
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