essay, Davis hit a
triple. In all the threads, he has either held steady or advanced
the frontier. It is interesting in this regard to note that Davis
devotes many pages to JFK's assassination (pp. 436-498). He
writes that Kennedy died at the "hands of Lee Harvey Oswald and
possible co-conspirators" (p. 436). Later, he will write that
Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy (p. 552). Going even further, he can
state that:
It would be a misstatement, then, to assert that Deputy
Attorney General Katzenbach and the members of the Warren
Commission...consciously sought to cover up evidence
pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (P. 461)
As the declassified record now shows (Probe Vol. 4 #6 "Gerald
Ford: Accessory after the Fact") this is just plain wrong. Davis
then tries to insinuate any cover-up was brought on by either a
backfiring of the Castro plots (Davis p. 454) or JFK's dalliance
with Exner (p. 498). As wrongheaded and against the declassified
record as this seems, this argument still has adherents, e. g.
Martin Waldron and Tom Hartman. They refine it into meaning that
the Kennedys had some kind of secret plan to invade Cuba in the
offing at the time of the assassination. This ignores the Church
Committee report, which shows that by 1963, Kennedy had lost
faith in aggression and was working toward accommodation with
Castro. It also ignores the facts that JFK would not invade Cuba
under the tremendous pressures of either the Bay of Pigs debacle,
or the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Bobby backed him on both
occasions. Reportedly, like Davis, Waldron likes to use CIA
sources like Bill Colby (Mr. Phoenix Operation) on JFK's ideas
about assassination. Just as Newman corrected the Vietnam record
in 1992, his long-awaited book Kennedy and Cuba will do much to
correct these