Three new / updated John Newman JFK books appearing on Amazon over the next few weeks

[Anthony Thorne]

John Newman has been discussing the contents of his books in some detail on Facebook, with researchers such as Lisa Pease and Douglas Valentine chipping in. John has now announced a new website and a forthcoming blog -

We are building a new web site with more information about Countdown to Darkness and JFK and Vietnam. A blog will be added in a couple of days, as well as images of the documents I have posted on FB over the past month and videos and other content.

The website is here.

https://jfkjmn.com

Alan Dale posted a review on Amazon, which led to some discussion between Lisa Pease and Newman. I'm reprinting the review, and the discussion here, as I think both are of interest.

Alan Dale's Amazon review -

Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume II is the important next step in the extraordinary and ambitious work of one of our most essential contemporary historians, Dr. John Newman. I have characterized Volume I as being not supremely well suited for those who are new to the deepest areas of current JFK research. Countdown to Darkness places its predecessor, Where Angels Tread Lightly, in appropriate context as our necessary point of entry, and affirms that Dr. Newman is doing something that no one has ever done. What he is producing on the related areas of this topic is unprecedented in its scope and density. The publication of Volume II makes clear that the continuation of Dr. Newman's work-in-progress on the assassination of President Kennedy defines, as comprehensively as possible, a multi-dimensional representation of what can be known during this time.

Across an enormously broad chronological range and geographical landscape, Dr. Newman's work, which includes the newly updated and expanded second edition of JFK and Vietnam, maintains that our task requires we must properly identify and understand every individual on the playing field as Cold War hot-spots were being targeted for U.S. plans and actions, and America's National Security executives were ordered to execute what Dr. Newman refers to as President Eisenhower's "Cold War Triple Play," the elimination, through covert and plausibly deniable means, of Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, and Fidel Castro. President Eisenhower's orders to do this, and the manner and means by which actions were initiated to carry them out before the end of the president's second term, would have supremely serious ramifications for John F. Kennedy as presidential candidate, president-elect, and most of all, once he was inaugurated as president at noon on January 20th, 1961.

Volume II continues to build upon the major working hypotheses and further assumptions set forth in Volume I. The following are introduced with the publication of Countdown to Darkness:


(New): The deaths of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republicwithout regard to who actually pulled the triggerswere ultimately the result of President Eisenhower's top secret plan according to which their elimination was an indispensable requirement for the success of his covert plan to overthrow Castro.


(New): President Kennedy's April 1961 decisions against direct U.S. military intervention in Cuba and Laos spawned the deep hatred in many circles that gathered momentum during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later become a critical part of the motivation for his assassination in 1963.


(New): Lee Harvey Oswald was a witting false defector sent to the USSR as U-2 flypaper as part of an elaborate plan to trap a KGB mole in the CIA (Popov's mole)


· (New): DCI Allen Dulles was aware, well before Congo's independence, of Belgium's plans for the secession of Katanga Province.


· (New): The claims, by top advisors to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, that an exile invasion would trigger an uprising of the Cuban population against Castro were known to be false by those who made them.


· (New): The CIA attempt to cobble together a functional government-in-exile from the exiled Cuban leaders was doomed to fail right from the start.


· (New): Given the level and timing of Soviet Bloc military aid to the Castro regime, there was not enough time to adequately prepare, train, and equip a Cuban exile military force capable of toppling the regime.


· (New): DCI Allen Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew that the CIA- planned invasion of Cuba would fail, and deliberately withheld this judgment from the president. Furthermore, they assumed that, once the exile forces were being slaughtered on the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy would reverse his policy of refusing to intervene with U.S. military forces.


· (New): Allen Dulles hoped that DDP Dick Bissell would be fired for the failed landing in Cuba, and that Dulles would get to remain as the DCI instead of being replaced by Bissell as JFK had originally planned.

It need not go without saying that these works, which must include JFK and Vietnam, second edition, complement one another and serve our interests best when viewed and evaluated together. JFK and Vietnam created a media firestorm when it was originally published in 1992. It was attacked (and defended) from all sides, and, significantly, it was embraced and supported by former DCI William Colby and former special assistant to President Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., people who were there and felt that the story had never been examined with this kind of authority nor told with this kind of documentation. I feel very strongly that there is value in looking closely at these works in relation to each other. Reading and absorbing as much as we can of JFK and Vietnam provides deeper context and broader perspective of Dr. Newman's work on the assassination of President Kennedy.

I would like to add one additional personal observation. Countdown to Darkness is addressing issues in the years leading up to Dallas which the author understands to be necessary for our purposes. He has said that, contrary to what many authors of works offering conclusions might desperately try to make us believe, we are, in fact, at the beginning of a serious investigation of 1.) President Kennedy's murder, 2.) who were the ultimate perpetrators, and 3.) how they got away with it. The experience of reading this book, part of which examines controversial issues which we do encounter along our journey, has forced me to confront specific allegations which until now have been too distasteful for me to consider. Those of us who look upon the Kennedy brothers as heroes, and for whom the impact of their deaths created emotional wounds which will never completely heal, are acutely sensitive to and on guard against character assassination and tabloid accusations which over many years and periodic revivals seem designed to diminish the memory of their lives so that the significance of their deaths may be devalued. Having to confront certain issues which are present in the story being examined has been ugly and difficult for me, and maybe it's helped me grow up a little. Maybe it has forced me to venture outside of my comfort zone, maybe it's a good thing to be able to at least look at things we would not choose to be true whether they are true or not, maybe we are better off if we have the courage and willingness to admit that knowledge is indifferent to what we want to be true. Because of the work of Dr. John Newman, I am determined more than ever to confront the things I was afraid to look at and, at a minimum, to concede that for progress to be earned we must examine everything in our path so that we may learn what is important and what is not in our continuing quest for greater knowledge and deeper understanding of the events which preceded the assassination of President Kennedy.

Dr. John Newman is a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer who served for two years as Executive Military Assistant to the Director, General William Odom at the National Security Agency. He has testified before various sub-committees of the U.S. House of Representatives, has worked as a consultant on two major motion pictures and to various U.S. and foreign media organizations including PBS Frontline, the History Channel, C-Span, NBC, and other news agencies. His experience and expertise as a strategic intelligence cryptologic analyst makes his qualifications and credentials unique among those who choose to delve into the hidden histories buried within America's military and intelligence bureaucracies. For the past quarter century his work has overturned orthodoxies, broken new ground, introduced new facts, and produced revelations about America during the Cold War.

Highest recommendation.

In response to the above review, Pease and Newman had the following conversation.

Lisa Pease: I gave a presentation to John and others at Gary Aguilar's gathering a few years ago about how RFK and JFK were not only not trying to kill Castro, but how the CIA was laying down a provably false trail to implicate them. John has never rebutted that work to me and I asked that if anyone found actual evidence, to share it with me. If he's just ignoring all that now, that would be upsetting.

John Newman: Lisa, I am currently working on that subjectit enters the strike zone for Volume III, "Into the Storm" (April '61-summer '62). I have been surprised about a great many things in the course of this endeavor so far. I have found it best not to get ahead of myself and just follow the evidence as it unfolds.

Lisa Pease: I just know that every single time I've found something that looked like it placed the blame at their feet, if I KEPT digging, there was rebuttal evidence to that. So it's not enough to be accurate - one has to be thorough too. I know it was a big part of your thesis when you presented at the last AARC conference. But all the facts worked with a different explanation - that the CIA was trying to paint the Kennedys into that awful picture to hide the fact that they had gone rogue. When I first looked into the Kennedys' possible role in the Castro plots, all accusations in the books of others tracked back to the assertions of Sam Halpern. But when Jeff Morley talked to Halpern, he said something that made a lie of what he had told the others. He said the CIA was furious at Robert Kennedy because he only wanted to do actions in Cuba that amounted to no more than "pin pricks." The animosity the CIA had toward Robert Kennedy is so palpable. Halpern had no love for the Kennedys and no desire to protect. But there's no way you could call an assassination plot a pin prick. I think Halpern admitted the truth to Morley because everything he told others was at variance with the record.

And bottom line, there's no way to read the Castro reports plot and say they were covering for Kennedy when they said the CIA could not claim they were following Kennedy's orders in the plots. They admitted they told RFK only of the plots that had ended, not the plots that were continuing. That document was never meant to see the light of day for a reason.

John Newman: I believe it is fair to point out that I am in no way ignoring this subject. I have already put it on the table generally in Vol I: "Hypothesis Two: The plot was also designed to make it appear that the Kennedy brothers' plan to overthrow Castro had been successfully turned around by Fidel, resulting in the assassination of President Kennedy." In Vol II I have said that I still see this to be the case. I have not specifically discussed whether the plan to overthrow Fidel (during JFK administration) included a presidential direct or indirect plot to assassinate Castro. I need to take time to go through this myself. It is one of the many topics that is at the top of my list for volume III.

Lisa Pease: And that is as far as truth allows, from all I have seen, and that's been an area of deep interest to me since I first started looking into this.