Book Review: John Newman’s Into The Storm: The
Assassination of President Kennedy Volume III – Mike Swanson (03/05/2019)
Posted on March
5, 2019 by Michael
Swanson
With John Newman’s release of Into The Storm: The Assassination Of
President Kennedy Volume III we are getting closer to discovering the
real truth of the JFK assassination. As the subtitle implies this is one
book in a series of books and there are more to come. It now takes a
series of books to do the excavation necessary to do the topic justice.
In the decade following JFK the assassination
several books came out that demolished most of the Warren Commission findings
by the first generation of what were then called “critics” of the report.
Books such as Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment became best sellers and then Jim
Garrison made headlines with his New Orleans trial of Clay Shaw, charging him
with being involved in a conspiracy linked to manipulating Oswald. The
real Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw connection is weirder
than people knew.
Then in the 1970’s several Congressional investigations
into the activities of the US intelligence community and one into the MLK and
JFK assassinations brought more information to light.
While most of the books of the 1960’s focused on the
Warren Commission evidence and the simple question of whether or not its
conclusions were credible interest in the assassination took off in the 1980’s
and 1990’s as dozens if not hundreds of more books came out especially in the
aftermath of the Oliver Stone JFK movie. Most of these books tried to
make major conclusions about the assassination by blaming this or that person
or party as being responsible for it using mostly material from the
Congressional investigations of the 1970’s.
The JFK movie created a public demand for the
release of classified material relating to the JFK assassination. Much
was released afterwards and new material also came out to help historians
understand the JFK administration.
John Newman was a pioneer in doing the latter with
his book JFK and Vietnam, which proved that President Kennedy left office with
a troop withdrawal plan from South Vietnam that would have been completed by
1965. Work by other authors such as Gareth Porter and Howard Jones and
new documents have backed up his thesis.
More information has also come out about the Cuban
Missile Crisis and covert operations against Cuba since the JFK movie, but more
is still being discovered. James Douglas’s book JFK and the Unspeakable provided a
breakthrough in helping bring a new understanding to JFK’s foreign policy.
These three new books by Newman though are the first
published books to take advantage of the new JFK files released in 2017.
People are still going through the new files and Newman is too and that is why
his work is not complete.
In fact at this time it is probably
disingenuous for someone to put out a single volume solution on the JFK
assassination. It’s a complicated topic and simple big simplistic claims
like LBJ did it don’t easily fit into this complex evidence. The
notion that his buddy Mack
Wallace was a gunman has been disproven by Joan Mellon. There is a long
list of JFK
assassination myths that are now being demolished that do nothing but
distract.
In the Oliver Stone movie a character called “Mr. X”
challenged the audience to ask why was Kennedy killed? We are at a point
now where the serious researcher may start to actually get closer to finding
out the answer to who by asking how.
David Talbot put out a book titled The Devil’s Chessboard in 2015 positing
that CIA Director Allen Dulles was responsible for the JFK assassination.
In his book he quotes Dulles as saying that as one who served on the Warren
Commission he found that “it was so tantalizing to go over that record [of
events], as we did, trying to find out every fact connected with the
assassination, and then to say if any one of the chess pieces that were entered
into the game had been differently, at any one time, the whole thing might have
been different.”
Newman’s book JFK and Vietnam and Douglas’s JFK and
the Unspeakable began to open the light to bring the chessboard into dim
view. Newman’s book Into the Storm is now shedding more light on it and
is now putting some of the chess pieces into view.
Topic covered in this book include more details on
Operations Northwoods – a Pentagon proposal to create incidents to justify an
invasion of Cuba and how Operation Mongoose itself was really used as a
precursor to the proposals. Also in this book is more on Oswald and his
real purpose to go to Russia as a pawn in CIA/KGB Cold War spy games. How
the Berlin Crisis was a key moment in JFK’s Presidency and how he only got in
office by almost freak luck with a phone call to MLK’s wife. And he
smashes myths such as how one story that captured the entire JFK research
community by Antonia Veciana just doesn’t hold water and how one CIA employee
constructed a false myth that RFK was involved with mafia plots against Castro
that has taken hold in the mind of the public, American power elite, and even
the intelligence community itself to justify a CIA “benign” cover-up of the
assassination.
This is an important work and I’m looking forward to
the next volume. A simple narrative story of the assassination in one
book no longer is enough to make sense of it. Newman applies a technique
he learned from his own career as an intelligence officer to “overlay”
information on top of one another to study the assassination and share his
discoveries in these books. The reader can jump into this book without
reading the first two. It can stand on its own, but when finished the
series as a whole probably will have to be read in its entirety. For a
serious study of the JFK assassination it is a necessary work to own.
The book is available at Amazon by going here.
Filed in: The
Past American Century
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