Eleanor Coppola

Eleanor Coppola is dead at 87. Known as the wife of director Francis Coppola, Eleanor was a creative force in her own right -- as well as a mother and anchor to a volatile genius. I knew her slightly, because I'm a former tenant of the Zoetrope building, the copper-plated San Francisco landmark owned by Eleanor and her husband, who always kept the rents low for working authors and artists like me. And my wife Camille Peri interviewed her long ago for Salon -- an in-depth conversation that Eleanor later told Camille she particularly appreciated.

One time, when I pushed our first baby Joe in a stroller in North Beach, I recall that Eleanor and Francis looked at him from a restaurant window with warmth and sadness in their eyes. Their first-born son Gino had recently been killed in a boating accident.

Eleanor Coppola was quiet, dignified and intelligent. She wrote the revealing diaries about her turbulent married life -- including the inside story about the making of Apocalypse Now, one of her husband's masterpieces -- that later became her gripping 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness. In her 80s, she also made two dramatic films.

I like how she described the way she navigated her long marriage to Francis. They were "opposites in every way," she remarked, and they weathered "plenty of friction." But, she added, "it's good friction, it's a creative friction. You grow from it. You don't go to sleep at the wheel."

There are ghosts that loom large when I walk the streets of North Beach these days. Eleanor Coppola's spirit is now one of them.

Oh! What a Lovely War

As the war in the Middle East widens and the war in Ukraine drags bloodily on, here's to all of my former antiwar friends who've discovered their inner warrior (and will never die in battle). It's "Army Dreamers," the 1980 song by Kate Bush. Yes, but she's kind of nuts, you say. And that was before Putin invaded Ukraine and Hamas slaughtered innocent Israelis. Etc. etc. There's always an excuse for war. Once upon a time, my generation marched in the streets. Once upon a time, we sang "Give Peace a Chance." What happened to all of my brothers and sisters?

Here's the music video and lyrics to "Army Dreamers." (The BFPO is the postal service for the British military.)

Army Deeamers

B.F.P.O.

Army dreamers

Mammy's hero

B.F.P.O.

Mammy's hero

Our little army boy

Is coming home from B.F.P.O.

I've a bunch of purple flowers

To decorate mammy's hero

Mourning in the aerodrome

The weather warmer, he is colder

Four men in uniform

To carry home my little soldier

(He should have been a rock star)

But he didn't have the money for a guitar

(What could he do?)

(Should have been a politician)

But he never had a proper education

(What could he do?)

(Should have been a father)

But he never even made it to his twenties

What a waste

Army dreamers

Oh, what a waste of

Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)

Tears o'er a tin box

Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know

Like a chicken with a fox

He couldn't win the war with ego

Give the kid the pick of pips

And give him all your stripes and ribbons

Now he's sitting in his hole

He might as well have buttons and bows

(He should have been a rock star)

But he didn't have the money for a guitar

(What could he do?)

(Should have been a politician)

But he never had a proper education

(What could he do?)

(Should have been a father)

But he never even made it to his twenties

What a waste

Army dreamers

Ooh, what a waste of

Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)

Ooh, what a waste of all them

Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)

Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)

Army (army) dreamers (dreamers), oh

B.F.P.O.

Army dreamers

Mammy's hero

B.F.P.O.

Army dreamers

Mammy's hero

B.F.P.O.

No hard heroes

Mammy's hero

B.F.P.O.

Army dreamers

Mammy's hero

B.F.P.O.

All reactions:

6Pete Johnson, Sverre Haanes and 4 others

Taking Back San Francisco

It's official. Aaron Peskin -- the best person to run our city, the mayoral candidate whom every thinking progressive wanted desperately to run -- has entered the race.

At his kickoff rally yesterday in San Francisco Chinatown's Portsmouth Square, Peskin gave a lusty speech attacking the tech and real estate billionaires who've taken over the city and given us nothing but an obscene wealth gap, vacant storefronts, more homelessness, drug addiction and other misery. And now they promise that AI will fix everything.

If you believe that, there some shares in Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency company I'd like to sell you.

As Peskin predicted, the billionaires will try to tear him apart. In fact, there was a gaggle of obnoxious and loud anti-Aaron protesters yesterday on the fringes of Portsmouth Square, trying to drown out Peskin's speech. The raucous protesters were apparently paid by tech mogul Garry Tan, who issued death threats against both Peskin, who is president of the Board of Supervisors, and Dean Preston, another progressive board member (who was also at the rally yesterday with Supervisor Connie Chan and former mayor Art Agnos, the last progressive to occupy City Hall's Room 200).

The anti-Aaron protesters carried signs that weirdly compared Peskin to Donald Trump, his political opposite, and called for him to be squashed like an insect. Tech billionaires like Tan have injected a poisonous rhetoric into the city.

In contrast, Peskin's speech was upbeat and positive. He wants to make San Francisco affordable again. He wants to make the city a beacon once again for teachers and nurses and social workers and firefighters -- and also for the creative dreamers who put the city on the map. The writers, poets, artists, musicians and other cultural renegades who made San Francisco great.

"We won't destroy the city to save it," Peskin pledged in his speech on Saturday. "Let's save our city without sacrificing our values."

That's the inclusive, inspiring vision I wanted to hear in the San Francisco mayor's race, which has been dominated until now by corporate sock puppets, including incumbent London Breed.

I'll be honest. I was one of those urging Aaron to run. So I'm very excited today. We have a good chance to take back the city we love. The city that came to mean so much to us during the Season of the Witch era that I chronicled.

But it takes a lot of courage to run for public office these days. And money -- lots of it.

“I have no doubt that this is going to be a difficult campaign; most of my opponents have at least one billionaire on their side, if not more,” Peskin said yesterday. “This handful of billionaires pouring millions of dollars of dark money into ugly smear campaigns threatens to destroy what makes this a unique, vibrant and magical city. And while I thankfully don’t have any billionaires on my side, I have you.

"We'll run a grassroots campaign" in every district, in every neighborhood, Peskin vowed -- "just like Art (Agnos) did" in his winning mayoral campaign in 1987.

I can understand why Aaron thought long and hard before entering the race. Politics, especially here in San Francisco, has become a dirty and expensive game.

But now Aaron is finally in, we need to support him. Please go to his website and donate your time or money or both.

Let's take back San Francisco.

(And yes, that's me with the candidate today.)

The Final Trip

We don’t talk much about death, because the dark beyond we all face terrifies us so much we try to avoid the subject. Our terror of death is one reason – a big one – that humanity is so crazy. It unnerves me, too – and it doesn’t. I’ve been on its doorstep. It’s more overwhelming for those who don’t want you to leave.

That brings me to Mark Dowie’s new book, Judith Letting Go, the remarkable story of his unique, six-moth love affair with a woman who had chosen the day of her death. Judith Tannenbaum chose to “let go” even though she was still full of love for life, because she suffered from a rare medical condition accompanied by excruciating pain, a physical torment for which there was no treatment. The story of the two-person “Death Café” that Judith and Mark formed in the last months of her life – which ended on December 4, 2019 – and the intimate conversations they shared at her modest home in El Cerrito, California are truly unforgettable. The little paperback – just 118 pages – is the most moving thing Dowie has done as a writer. And he’s done a lot.

I met Mark Dowie in 1981, when he was the friendly (and handsome) investigative editor of Mother Jones magazine, and I was the new staff member on the block. Even then, Dowie was something of a legend, the author of the seminal investigative article on the Ford Pinto, the exploding car that Ford valued over its human victims, and the co-author of the Dalkon Shield exposé, the birth-control implant that ripped apart the insides of women. After Mother Jones, Dowie went on to author ten books, including a critical one on the toothless environmental movement (Losing Ground), as well as to teach at the University of California- Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Mark also has led a very full life, as a young Wyoming ranch hand, businessman and investigative guru. His stories over drinks are full of eyebrow-raising tales. Wait, you did what?

He just mentions these jaw-dropping anecdotes about himself in passing.

So, when Mark mentioned to me that he had helped a number of people in their final hours, I was not surprised. But Judith’s story got my attention, and I encouraged him – as a fellow journalist – to tell this memorable story.

Dowie remains happily married to the same woman he met back in the ‘80s, artist Wendy Schwartz. But his evolving relationship with Judith, though it was not sexual, surprised them both. His connection with Judith grew more emotionally intense as she drew closer to death. 

Judith Tannenbaum was the mother and aunt of two grown, loving women when Dowie was introduced to her by a mutual friend. She was also the daughter of a 100-year-old woman who lived nearby. Judith wrote poetry and taught it to inmates at San Quentin, the maximum-security prison across the San Francisco Bay. The men she taught – including one lifer – loved and respected her. She also had taught in the Mendocino public school system.

She loved life. And she was determined to end it on a precise day.

The finality of their relationship gave it a special character, Dowie writes.

“Because my relationship with Judith was untrammeled by attachments, plans, secrets, fears of abandonment, and also free of complexity, commitment, duties, promises, and even the normative expectations of friendship, it became, as we both observed, ‘pure.’ I never thought before that there could actually be a relationship, a friendship that could be described as pure. But I was wrong, and here it was, kept so by the certainty and totality of its ending. We both knew, throughout, not only that it was going to end but also precisely when.

“To others in our lives, particularly my wife Wendy, it seemed at times ‘unfair… too easy.’ And in a way, Wendy was right. It was easy. Despite the looming heartbreak and constant profundity of our story’s inevitable ending.”

There is wonder and mystery and love and heartache in Judith Letting Go. As there is in life and death. I encourage all mortal people to read the book. It will live on in your thoughts.

The Silence of the Intellectuals

Would Gore Vidal (who was called antisemitic in his day) remain muffled? What is happening in Gaza right now is genocide in real time. U.S.-produced weapons are massacring and blockading starving Palestinians. And yet it takes an Indian-British intellectual -- Pankaj Mishra -- to call this Israeli atrocity what it is. A defamation of the Holocaust, the moral authority that Israel has increasingly wielded as a weapon against those who are weaker.

In "The Shoah After Gaza," his remarkable essay that London Review of Books emblazoned on its current cover, Mishra writes: "Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built. But these universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist."

Mishra goes on to invoke Jewish intellectuals like Primo Levi and Jean Amery -- both survivors of Auschwitz -- who began to question how Israel's militaristic leaders were exploiting the Shoah to slaughter Arabs and steal their land. Both men committed suicide. But before he died, Amery -- a strong defender of Israel -- pleaded with Israel's leaders to "acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him."

Levi, for his part, also felt an emotional bond with Israel, but warned that the Jewish state "is rapidly falling into total isolation... We must choke off the impulses toward emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel's current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class."

By 1969, Mishra notes, the Jewish theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz -- who won the Israel Prize in 1993 -- was already decrying the "Nazification" of Israel.

It's the duty of U.S. intellectuals and artists to speak out against this crime against humanity. But, besides a few, they have allowed themselves to be silenced. Speak up now, or forever hold your tongue.

Oscar Airheads

After winning the Best Director and Best Picture awards for Oppenheimer -- his epic movie about the father of the atomic bomb -- Christopher Nolan did not mention his subject once. He -- and his wife, producer Emma Thomas, who accepted the Best Picture statuette -- nattered on about all the show biz and family members they wanted to thank. But not once did Nolan or Thomas mention that their film is about the extinction of the human race.

Look, I get that the Academy Awards platform has been overused in the past by honorees with pet political issues to share with the world. But to go completely silent about Oppenheimer and his moral demons on this big stage strikes me as overly cautious or simply obtuse. I think Nolan is both. His overly praised films show it as well as his arrogant British reticence. Grow a spine (and a brain), man. Say something relevant when it's called for. At least Cillian Murphy, who won the Best Actor award for playing Oppenheimer, saluted "peacemakers everywhere" in his brief acceptance speech.

Other than that, the Oscars show was predictably dull. You didn't miss a thing.

Say nothing: Emma Thomas and husband Christopher Nolan accept the Best Picture award for Oppenheimer.

Dead Man Walking: The Zombie Candidacy of Joe Biden

 That shuffling, clanking noise you’re hearing louder and louder? It’s not the ghost of Dickens’s Jacob Marley – it’s the creaking re-election campaign of President Joe Biden.

 This weekend, the New York Times, in conjunction with Siena College, released a damning poll on the president’s 2024 run, headlined “Warming Polls Flash for Biden.” The Times poll found that Donald Trump is now beating Biden by five points, with only one in four thinking the country is going in the right direction and a majority of voters saying the economy is in poor condition. Biden is even losing support among women, black and Latino voters, the core groups of the Democratic Party.

 A follow-up Times report was also dismal for Biden, with 61 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020 now saying he’s “just too old” to be president for a second term. This Times finding was backed up by other recent polls, including one  conducted by Bloomberg News and another by NBC News, which found that a whopping 76 percent of those polled expressed concern about the president’s age and fitness.

 Clearly, the anxiety about President Biden’s mental acuity, which started as a propaganda meme on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, is growing like kudzu.

 Over the weekend, the opening skit of Saturday Night Live even featured the theme, with California Governor Gavin Newsom (a slick-haired Michael Longfellow) and others Biden supporters dutifully singing the praises of the aging commander-in-chief, including his remarkable physical prowess, stamina and even tech wizardry. Unfortunately, a clueless President Biden (Mikey Day) was then shown botching FaceTime on his cell phone.

 The nervous chattering about the president’s advanced age grew louder last month when Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s retention of classified material, excused his behavior by stating he’s a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a double-edged sword if there ever was one.

 If Biden is re-elected in November, he will beat his own record as the oldest sitting president, turning 86 at the end of his second term. Trump is only four years younger, but he comes off as pugnaciously energetic, and recent polls have been kinder to him. According to the Times poll, only 19 percent of voters think Trump’s age would prevent him from serving a second term.

 The white knuckles among Biden supporters will be very evident on Thursday night when the president delivers his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress and a national TV audience. Will Biden project leadership and vitality? Will he seem mentally alert? Can he read his prepared text off the teleprompter?

 The bar for Biden is strikingly low. And yet it’s very high. His opponents – and the general public – will not just be watching for his usual gaffes, but signs that he is losing it. That’s he’s not fit to be our chief executive.

 As I’ve written here before, the Democratic establishment would be wise to replace Biden with a stronger candidate. The trouble is that the party has become a nexus of powerful corporate forces and is strongly opposed to any insurgent candidacy that can breathe new life into the presidential race. The Democratic status quo resisted the presidential challenge of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, as well as the campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr., who was forced to leave the party and become an independent candidate.

 As political pundits generally agree, the Democratic Party has a Biden conundrum. They can’t turn to Vice President Kamala Harris because her poll numbers are even weaker than the president’s. Nor can she easily be replaced by her “good friend” Newsom or other Plan B favorites like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, because they are white and they lack national name recognition.

 “Biden must save Biden from himself,” as progressive filmmaker Michael Moore recently commented on Rumble. “It’s the only way to ensure Trump never sets foot in the Oval Office again.”

 The problem is that the doddering -- yet determined -- Biden is not going anywhere. And there are no “wise men” in the Democratic Party to tell him to step down.

 “There is no council of elders and I’m not sure if there was that an incumbent president, no matter who it was, would listen to them,” David Plouffe, a former campaign strategist for Barack Obama, told Peter Baker, the White House correspondent for New York Times. “He thinks, ‘Hey, I won and I beat the guy who’s going to run against me and I can do it again.’”

 Evan Osnos, a political correspondent for The New Yorker, reports the same Biden stubbornness: “I will tell you that my reporting really almost astonished me with how this man has no doubts… He believes he is the only one (who can beat Trump)…. (This) level of conviction is going to go down in history as either having been an extraordinary case of resisting all of what he would call the chattering class…or it will go down in history as having been a terrible miscalculation.”

 Former President Barack Obama, you say – he can advise Joe it’s time to go. After all, Biden was his loyal wingman when he was vice president. The two men are said to have a good relationship. Maybe Barack can convince Biden that only, say, Michelle Obama can save the nation from Trump 2.

 But Obama is not very persuasive. He couldn’t even get Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down as a Supreme Court justice when he invited her to a White House lunch in July 2013. Instead, the proud Ginsburg died at 87 during Trump’s reign and he promptly filled her lifelong seat with 48-year-old, right-wing, fundamentalist Amy Coney Barrett.

 Come to think of it, Biden apparently resented it when President Obama told him it was Hillary Clinton’s turn to run for president in 2016. So maybe pushing his wife as a Biden replacement in 2024 would not be a good idea.

 We’ve all seen this horror movie. The mummy is about to rise from its sarcophagus and strangle our hero. Look out, you want to scream! Nobody wants a Biden-Trump rematch. It’s a nightmare from which we can’t wake.

 If only there was another presidential candidate out there. Somebody to inspire us, to awaken our better angels. Oh wait --- there is!

                                             #

Oh, Goodie! ANOTHER Corporate Dullard Wants to Lead San Francisco!

Oh, goodie! Just what San Francisco needs! ANOTHER lackluster tech and real estate sock-puppet candidate for mayor! Only reporter Heather Knight of the New York Times (formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle) would call Mark Farrell's mayoral campaign a revolt from the right. What's cop-loving, tech-loving Mayor London Breed -- a fiery socialist?

Look: EVERYONE now in the campaign to run San Francisco is a hard-core, corporate-funded conservative, even if they call themselves Democrats or even progressives. Mark Farrell is a none-too-sharp venture capitalist who lives with his family in a swanky neighborhood. His wife was active in the campaign to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Do you think he has ANY visionary idea of how to revive this once great city --a city that's been TRASHED by the same corporate forces that are backing him and every other SF mayoral candidate?

I'll keep shouting until I'm hoarse: San Francisco desperately needs a visionary leader who knows how to turn around this city. Not another corporate hack like Farrell.

Mark Farrell announces his mayoral run, God help us.

Let’s Put on a Show!

Ever since they were published, my books The Devil's Chessboard and Season of the Witch have been optioned by various studios, producers and directors in Hollywood as dramas and documentaries, for TV and movies. But they have never made it to the screen. Write it off to business as usual in Hollywood. Or, in some cases, to political controversy and "catch and kill."

In any case, my patience has worn thin. Fuck the Hollywood gatekeepers. They're cheap and timid and ignorant. They never think big. That's why the current entertainment industry fare is so banal, so forgettable.

But maybe you have a John Cassavetes or Francis Coppola or Dorothy Arzner or Stanley Kubrick in you… Or yes, an Oliver Stone. Maybe you're willing to challenge the system or to go outside of it.

If you have a track record as a movie or TV maker and you have the money, I now own the the screen rights to all of my books. If you are serious about these stories and have a compelling way to translate them for an audience -- and frankly the money -- let's talk. You can reach me at: david@talbotplayers.com. Please don't waste my time unless you're a serious player.

As many readers know, The Devil's Chessboard (a New York Times bestseller, despite the NYT blackout) is the greatest spy story never told. One reviewer wrote John le Carre or Graham Greene could do no better. A son of Hollywood, I wrote the book cinematically. It cries out to be a movie or limited TV series.

Season of the Witch (a national bestseller) is also a grabber -- the story of how a unique American city was liberated in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. As I wrote, San Francisco was not born with flowers in its hair, but howling in blood and strife. The action in those years was wild and nonstop, the characters leapt off the page. The book wrote itself.

Dramatists of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Contact me.

Wanted: Brave Leaders

Cheers to Senator Bernie Sanders and San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston. Sanders sponsored a resolution that would have compelled the State Department to inspect Israel's dismal human rights record -- and the U.S. role in Israel's actions. (The U.S. is by far the largest funder of military assistance to Israel.) Sanders's resolution was voted down by the Senate. But with at least 25,000 Palestinians now killed by the IDF in Gaza -- most of them women and children -- the Israel lobby's stranglehold on Washington is starting to fray, with several Democratic senators voting for Sanders's proposal.

Here in San Francisco, Supervisor Dean Preston successfully engineered an 8-3 board vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid to the people there, and a return of the surviving hostages held by Hamas.

The fact that both Sanders and Preston are Jews and have Holocaust victims and survivors in their families give their actions moral strength.

According to a powerful essay in the Sunday Opinion section of the New York Times by Megan Stack, a former Middle East correspondent, South Africa's genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice "is strong." As Stack concludes, with Israeli attacks on civilians making nowhere in the Gaza Strip safe -- even hospitals and places of worship -- we are witnessing genocide in progress.

Considering Israel's ongoing atrocities, San Francisco Mayor London Breed's denunciation of the Board of Supervisors' ceasefire vote is shameful. In a rare condemnation of the board, Breed had the nerve to say the vote "did not reflect our values."

Excuse me? The failing mayor of a failing city gives herself the right to define our community values? To accuse the Board of Supervisors of being out of touch? (For the record, the San Francisco vote also condemned anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.)

In her six years as mayor, Breed has presided over the sharp decline of a once-great city. The downtown area is still boarded up after the Covid pandemic -- as well as many stores in the neighborhoods -- because she banked on the endless rise of the tech industry. Homeless camps still dot the city because there is no housing to put these people in. Breed is good at cleaning out city blocks for conventioneers who matter, and playing to the wealthy and powerful. But she has no people's touch. She cares only about her political career. Following the public outcry over George Floyd's murder, she was for police reform. Now she's against it. She was for safe injection sites -- the single quickest way to prevent drug deaths-- but now she opposes them. As a result, there has been a record number of drug overdoses on her watch.

Breed decides who she is from day to day by holding her finger in the political wind.

Who will rid us of this terrible mayor? To date the only political rivals to Breed in the November election are a supervisor to her RIGHT (yep) and a hapless rich kid who has raised money for charity or something. No serious candidate to Breed's left has emerged.

Are the heroic days of San Francisco that I wrote about in Season of the Witch -- the grit that my son Joe Talbot dramatized in The Last Black Man in San Francisco -- truly over?

I refuse to think so. Somewhere out there is a leader. Somewhere out there is a hero.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston

Let Us Now Praise Paul Cummins

The justly famed and revered Los Angeles educator saved my young life. After heading the English department at the then Harvard School for Boys (now Harvard-Westlake), Cummins fell afoul of the stern headmaster Father William Chalmers when he turned the department into a progressive oasis, and left for the more enlightened Oakwood School. The next year, after I was elected Harvard School's senior class president (against Chalmers's best efforts), I too crossed swords with the headmaster when I opposed the school's compulsory military program at the height of the Vietnam War. Chalmers forced me out midway through my senior high school year, writing to every college to which I applied that I should not be admitted because I was a "disciplinary risk." (Only UC-Santa Cruz, bless them, took a chance on me.)

Cummins, sympathizing with me, pulled strings to let me attend Oakwood the final months of the school year and graduate from high school. If he hadn't, I would've been drafted and fled to Canada -- or, more likely, gone underground.

Paul Cummins was -- and still is -- closer to my older brother Stephen Talbot and to my brother-in-law Dave Davis. In addition to teaching them English, he also coached them in varsity football. Cummins was a man's man in the old, best sense --- he was handsome, smart and believed in the life of the mind as well as sports. (He played football at Stanford.)

After serving as the vice principal at Oakwood, Cummins went on to found the legendary Crossroads School and New Roads School in Santa Monica, and became a leading educational advocate for at-risk and incarcerated youth.

At 86, Paul Cummins is still one of the good guys.

Every January, Cummins also sends a booklet of his poetry to his network of friends and admirers. He was moved to write the following poem because he took note, like many of us did, of the 60th anniversary of JFK's murder. I'm posting the poem's burning first stanza. The fire still burns in Paul -- so does the wisdom.

JFK Redux

"The sun allows you to see only what the sun

Falls upon: the surface."

-- Frank Bidart, "Against Silence"

Out the window care, tossed, no?

Yet did we not care before?

Care who did what and how and why?

And care when some plot uncloaked,

Did we not respond vigorously?

Say when a head of state assassinated?

The murder in public of the president --

Followed then by the periodic unraveling

Of an oafish conspiracy exposing treachery

Only to have it officially swept aside,

For how could the country abide

Knowing it was the country itself --

Its own elected and appointed caretakers

Who conspired to murder their own leader --

He too liberal for their oligarchic machinations,

He a threat to the ever-expanding industry

Of war -- now as we can clearly see --

Now the condition of perpetual war

So ingrained it simply must be.

Besides, who cares?

Paul Cummins and friend

My New Year Message

I turned 72 in September, which is a sort of achievement.

A couple of days ago, I watched the episode of The Crown featuring the wonderful Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret. I should have been more shaken up by Manville's portrayal of the devil-may-care princess's strokes and decline. After her initial stroke, Margaret chose to keep smoking and drinking and partying , and her lifestyle soon killed her.

I'm still here after my 2017 stroke. Probably because I don't smoke, I take my meds, and I cut back on my drinking and partying.

Since my medical calamity, I've written two books, a screenplay, a short story and now a weekly column (in addition to my musings here). I cheered my wife Camille Peri as she finished writing her greatest literary achievement, A Wilder Shore, the chronicle of the bohemian marriage between Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, which will be released by Viking Penguin in August 2024. We watched our oldest son Joe Talbot win the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival and other plaudits for his remarkable achievement The Last Black Man in San Francisco -- and we'll soon celebrate the college graduation of our youngest son Nathaniel (Nat). I'm so so grateful I lived to do and see all of that.

So it's true -- since my stroke, I've led a full life. I have fun. Yes, I'll always be physically fucked up -- I'm permanently wobbly, walk outdoors with a cane, can't drive etc. Life and its sorrowful news break my heart every day. But I'm glad I'm still alive.

These days, I spend as much time thinking about the past and close ones who've died. Hey, I'm old. But I'm still surrounded by family and friends. I look at flowers and trees with a new sense of wonder. I play old, favorites popular songs and classical pieces -- and I seek out new ones. Books and movies and TV shows too. I cry and laugh and FEEL more surprisingly. I find older women, women my age, interesting and erotic. They've led full lives, too. They have many stories -- and secrets -- to share.

Is that the best way to go out? Is it better to fade or implode? My (relatively) steady life ? Or that of Princess Margaret? We all die sooner or later.

I'm not looking forward to the New Year. The presidential race is already a shit-show. Yes, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is in the race, thank god. I welcome his candidacy despite what the NYT, NPR, MSNBC, AP etc tell you ad nauseam. RFK Jr. -- among the major presidential candidates -- is the only one who honestly articulates what is ailing America as it enters its turbulent period of imperial decline. He's the only candidate who talks about the rampant corporate corruption, political chaos, gluttony, environmental destruction and violence. Yes, and the monstrous rise of Big Pharma. But Bobby won't jump again in the polls until he tells the full truth about Israel and Palestine.

America desperately needs to have a national dialogue about its future -- one without acrimony and bitterness. We desperately need a new, national, citizens' movement for peace and justice. But I don't see that happening. Instead, we're fragmented and stupefied.

Are we old ones leaving something of worth behind, some guidance for the younger ones? I suppose that's why I practiced the oppositional journalism I did, why I wrote my books. I'm so glad when I hear that they have enlightened and inspired younger readers.

And so as the beast slouches toward Bethlehem, as we stumble into 2024, I'm not hopeful. But I'm still breathing. So are you.

What are we going to do about it?

(By the way, this illustration came from the Wonewoc (Wisconsin) Public Library. Support your local library.)

War Is the Health of the State

This essay by Jeffrey Sachs is the most acute dissection that I've read in a long time of War Inc., the United States's most booming industry. Why are we in Ukraine, why are we in Gaza, why are we everywhere blood flows? Read this and weep -- then work to overthrow this death system. Life in 2024! That's my New Year's wish.

Btw, speaking of our broken healthcare system, as we are below, Sachs also denounces Health Inc.

From Jeffrey Sachs's essay:

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money...

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.

Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.

On December 22, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstained from a watered-down UN resolution to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

Christmas in the ER

As Bill Simpich --a friend -- writes, the U.S. healthcare system is broken. He and his partner Joanne had the misfortune of rushing to various hospital emergency rooms in the San Francisco Bay Area during this holiday season. But their horrific experiences got him thinking: what if our medical system was actually, you know, healthy? What if the U.S. spent its vast wealth on helping people instead of killing them? It's the time of year to think big. Here are Bill's thoughts:

Merry Christmas to you, some of my favorite people in the world!

My present is a short brainstorm on health care in the USA during the winter solstice and how to deliver some of the simplest solutions in the right package. All feedback appreciated.

My partner Joanne was in six emergency rooms in eleven days this month, almost all with at least two hours time in the waiting room ...and that's how we got covid for the holidays...Pax Terra and Paxlovid!

These were all Sutter hospitals - Alta Bates Berkeley (the worst), Summit Medical Center (marginally better), and Sutter Novato (which we went to because we correctly figured it was less crowded - it was early morning in Marin County).

Joanne was really ill, for a variety of chronic and undiagnosed reasons - the most difficult for the emergency room to investigate. ERs are designed for a quick solution to keep people alive and whole. Not a place for someone suffering from unsolved miseries and not about to die - but convinced that would be the best way to go.

The very worst of it was that she was extraordinarily dizzy and nauseous, but the authorities wouldn't let her lie down. "There are no beds available and no place to lie down." Joanne is a former Sutter nurse herself, and let them know it, to adverse effect. When she almost fainted at Alta Bates, she was accused by the coordinator of faking it to get a bed. I wound up getting her prone between two chairs and had to advocate against the coordinator's demands for her to get up. I told them that we weren't mad but we weren't going to comply. They left her alone. The chairs at the other facilities were designed so that you couldn't even do that.

Which got me to thinking...my friend Katya shared with me this wonderful Latin phrase inscribed on Roman buildings - "Salus Populi Est Suprema Lex". The health of the people shall be the whole of the law.

What if there was a "Peoples' Emergency Room" - kind of "urgent care-plus", where no insurance plans were necessary? Where there was no waiting room, but dozens of spaces separated by curtains where people could lie down when ill while waiting for assistance for their physical, mental and emotional distress? Where they could get compassionate care - with solidarity and without blinking lights and whirring machines and alarms? De-emphasize without eliminating prescription medication, to reduce the need for a prescribing doctor? The facility could be run by the local health department. If the health department won't touch it, a big-time Kickstarter with the stakeholders could get it started - health care workers, techs, community members and more.

What if the cafeteria offered - as one example - burrito bowls with only-healthy local ingredients in reasonable quantities, better proportions (easy on the rice, amigo) and affordable prices?

What if a portion of the cafeteria had a jukebox with contemporary young people's music, vintage pinball machines, and looped videos about Medicare for All, College/Trade Schools for All, and all the other "nice things" we could have if we diverted half of the US military budget and imposed death knell taxes on fossil fuels?

What if a Sort-of-Socialist Supermarket adjacent to Peoples' Urgent Care was run as a nonprofit educational by the local health department - featuring not just local produce, but health care workers stocking healthy produce and educating consumers on the best food choices before they get to the registers? Wouldn't it be sweet to see blood sugar tests stationed by the bakery? How about blood pressure machines stationed by the meat department?

How about on-the-spot appointments with doctors after these sudden discoveries? An attractive venue with soft lights, designed for people to pursue their health goals rather than high-calorie purchases? A spot where people can learn about ways to shift their purchasing power to local farmers - again, with a lounge offering videos, music and art providing alternatives to the military budget and fossil fuels?

No matter how you feel about government or the lack of it - and I vacillate back and forth, as a confirmed big-government anarchist - there is no substitute for prefigurative politics - building the world we want to live in. There is nothing like the power of leading by example. Even Santa figured out that the way to get a package into the right hands is by going down the chimney.

The Israel Lobby and the Cancel Culture

It's not anti-Semitic to oppose Israel's slaughter of children and other innocent lives in Gaza. It's not anti-Semitic to call for an immediate ceasefire. You can advocate the downfall of Benjamin Netanyahu's extremist government (as thousands of brave Israeli protesters did earlier this year before the war conveniently saved him) and still support Israel's right to safely exist. You can oppose the massive flow of U. S. weapons to the IDF when Israel drops 2,000-pound bombs on civilians and commits war crimes.

In other words, you can love your Jewish brothers and sisters -- as I do -- and still stand for life and hope in Palestine, as many of them do.

But war fever has driven the Israel lobby in the U.S. to take militant (and fearful) positions. The AIPAC crowd has targeted Rep. Jamaal Bowman and other progressive (and in many cases non-white) political leaders. Why is Bowman being primaried? Because he had the nerve to speak out for a Gaza ceasefire. Likewise, university presidents (all women) have come under withering fire to resign because they dared to defend academic freedom.

The Israel lobby has become a loud and well-financed part of the cancel culture. Free speech -- especially about Palestinian human rights -- can silence you.

This weekend, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden raised millions of dollars at Hollywood events, co-hosted in many cases by Jewish executives and celebrities. Biden's poll numbers in the nation are rapidly sinking, but he remains very popular in the entertainment industry. In his remarks at the Hollywood fundraisers, President Biden did not mention Gaza once, though the issue is tearing apart his political party. Jill Biden did obliquely refer to it at one party, when the shouts and chants of pro-Palestinian protesters floated faintly from a nearby park, where the demonstrators had been corralled by the police.

“I’m so grateful Joe is our president during these uncertain times,” she ad-libbed, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd.

This is the very definition of elite, bubble-think.... the Bidens presiding over a Hollywood soiree where the tickets cost up to $500,000, while antiwar protesters are fenced in far away by the police. Meanwhile, President Biden vetoes a ceasefire resolution at the UN, thereby assuring there will be more bloodshed in Gaza.

And Democratic pundits wonder why more and more voters consider Biden out of touch.

The pro-war lobby is fracturing the Democratic Party and isolating the U.S. and Israel from most of the world.

Who benefits from this widening tragedy?

The Bidens are still hot in Hollywood.

Let Us Now Praise Norman Lear

Yes, Norman was a TV legend and all that. But thanks to former CBS president Jim Rosenfield, who was a Salon board member when my partner Mike O'Donnell and I were running the feisty media startup, Norman also joined our board -- and became my Jewish uncle, the avuncular, wise, unflappable, funny man I went to for guidance in Los Angeles.

Once I went to Norman's Beverly Hills office for Salon advice -- we were always on the verge of bankruptcy or some other disaster because of our rebellious politics and because, well, we were a dotcom business. "Norman," I said, "I need your advice."

"Go to her," he said without skipping a beat, "drop to your knees, beg her to forgive you."

"No, Norman," I smiled, "not that kind of advice."

He always made time for Mike and me. He always called on his many friends and contacts in Hollywood to help us. He was tickled that he was involved in a left-wing media enterprise with the son of Lyle Talbot, whom he thought of as a Reagan-like Hollywood conservative. (I explained that actually my father had swung to the left from his Midwestern Republican roots, and denounced Reagan, with whom he served on the Screen Actors Guild board, when "Ronnie" became president.)

Norman invited Mike and me and our wives to his 80th birthday gala celebration at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. My wife Camille and I sat at a table with the ebullient David Hyde Pierce, Ed Begley Jr. and a saturnine and silent Barry Levinson, and were charmed by Alec Baldwin. (I know, I know.) Warren Beatty went swanning by our table wearing actors' make-up. Yes, Hollywood is weird. But it was a fun night. Predictably, Norman turned it into a political event.

Salon's key investor John Warnock of Adobe just died. Now Norman. It's a passing of the guard who cared about progressive, fearless journalism. My crowd is next. Has the torch been passed?

Norman Lear

Biden’s Body Double

Gavin Newsom is the man Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be if Kennedy didn’t have a deeper soul. 

Newsom is a progressive when it comes to environmental protection, abortion defense, LGBTQ rights, gun control and other social issues. He’s good looking and dynamic. And he’s the “next rising Irish star in U.S. politics,” in the words of an Irish commentator, a high-profile Democrat poised to take Joe Biden’s place as the 2024 presidential candidate (despite his strong disavowals) if the octogenarian with glaring polling weaknesses steps down.

But Gavin Newsom is not his own man. He’s the creation of others, who are much more wealthy, much more powerful than him. Yes, he’s a rising star — but in someone else’s galaxy.

It’s true, he has his attractions. I’ve watched him closely ever since he was supervisor, then mayor of my hometown, San Francisco. If Newsom does become the Democrats’ back-room choice next year, he would make a formidable opponent of RFK Jr. Unlike the sophomoric debate-stage antics of Donald Trump, which have worn thin, Newsom and Kennedy would clash in illuminating ways, outlining the clear differences between the mainstream Democratic positions and those of an independent thinker like RFK Jr. As he showed last week in the Fox News-sponsored debate with pugnacious Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Newsom is not afraid to go into the lion’s den and exchange ideas (and barbs) with an adversary. He’s a skilled and smart debater. 

When it comes to RFK Jr., Newsom also takes a smoothly strategic tone, expressing sadness about Kennedy’s political evolution, rather than censorious scorn like many of his fellow Democrats. In a September interview with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, the California governor extolled RFK Jr. as “one of my great inspirations on the environment. “ But he also expressed regrets that they had diverged sharply on issues like the parole of Sirhan Sirhan (whom Kennedy boldly met with behind bars and knows didn’t fire the fatal shot that killed his father) and the statewide Covid lockdown (which Newsom himself infamously violated, dining with politically-connected friends at the exclusive French Laundry in the wine country). While describing his past relationship with RFK Jr. as “reverential,” Newsom also criticized him “for veering off on the spectrum.”

This attitude of pained disappointment with Kennedy is shrewd and, yes, slick, as Newsom himself is.

Like Joe Biden, Newsom aspires to the mantle of JFK and RFK. His late father, Judge William “Bill” Newsom, worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign before it ended tragically at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In 2017, when I was a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, I interviewed Gavin, who was then serving in the sleepy post of California’s lieutenant governor, while nursing his blue-sky ambitions. After the interview ran, Gavin thanked me in a text for “the balance in today’s article — the good, tough questions.” I replied that I was “rooting for you to be the JFK/RFK I know is inside you.” To which he texted, “I appreciate that, seriously!”

It's true — there is something Kennedyesque about Gavin Newsom. But I fear it’s mostly cosmetic. Unlike President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seen as a traitor to his class, Newsom has never betrayed his super-wealthy benefactors. 

Like his grandfather and father, Gavin has always been very close to the Gettys, the dynastic family that has long benefited San Francisco political luminaries like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris. (It was Bill Newsom who carried the ransom for John Paul Getty III.) Young Gavin went into the wine and hospitality business with Billy Getty, a grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who amassed the family fortune.

Gavin himself, a child of divorce, was not rich when he grew up. But he knew the path to success, he knew with whom to partner, and who to keep close. Two years ago, when the governor was scheduled to address a global climate crisis conference in Scotland, he opted instead to attend the glittering wedding of 27-year-old billionaire oil heiress Ivy Getty, a ceremony that took over San Francisco’s opulent city hall and was officiated by Speaker Pelosi.

Today, Gavin Newsom’s wealth is estimated between $18 and $22 million, mostly from his co-ownership of PlumpJack Associates, which runs a winery, restaurants, hotels and retail clothing stores. As DeSantis pointed out during their debate, Newsom is one of the hypocritical “liberal elite,” preaching the benefits of public education while sending his own four children to private school.

Besides the difference in their ages (81 and 56) and energy levels, there would be little dissimilarity between President Biden and a President Newsom. On the debate stage last week, Newsom loyally confirmed that he was a Biden man when it came to important issues like the economy and immigration. Unlike Biden administration officials, Newsom does not demonize China, a big trading partner of California. But like other current Democratic leaders, he celebrates U.S. imperial power and would continue our costly and bloody “forever wars” policy. President Newsom would also keep supporting the triumph of the oligarchy over democracy, as the governor’s alliance with Silicon Valley and Hollywood shows, as well as his close relationship with the real estate industry when he was mayor of San Francisco. 

Yes, a President Newsom would be Biden 2.0. Newer, more memory, more capacity — perhaps some AI. But the same machine.

Governors Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis

You Have to Seek Out the Truth

As I've pointed out, the New York Times -- and even "independent" information sites like Wikipedia -- are under the control of the national security establishment. The CIA no longer needs Operation Mockingbird to covertly control the press, because spooks and generals tell us what to think each night on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News -- and the war colossus has even vacuumed up independent news outlets. We live in an Orwellian world of daily, 24x7 disinformation.

Fortunately, there are a few cracks in this media stonewall. This is one of them... On the Kim Iversen Show, I was allowed to speak at length about the JFK assassination (of course) and the tragic state of the nation. Give the show a listen if you are looking for an alternative view.

At 60, We’re Winning - and Losing - the JFK Media War

Twelve days ago, I was asked by the Opinion section of the New York Times to write an essay on the JFK assassination nearly 60 years later. This was a major breakthrough because the newspaper of record has always embraced the official version of the assassination, even as the Warren Report, based on the "magic bullet" and all that nonsense, has grown increasingly tattered over the years. In 2015, when The Devil's Chessboard -- my book about CIA spymaster Allen Dulles and the national security state's war with President Kennedy -- was published, the Times refused to review it. (Nonetheless, the book was a New York Times bestseller.)

So it represented something of a milestone when the Times commissioned me to write a JFK article. I turned in a sober, detailed piece that was, if anything, TOO kind to the Times and the corporate media. The Times killed it anyway. (Below, you can read what my editor emailed me.) Sigh.

So, unfortunately, when it comes to the Big Media and JFK, we're still at square one at 60. The New York Times is STILL part of the cover-up.

A few days later, I was scheduled by Ben Wecht of the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University to give the closing speech at its annual conference, which is the best gathering of JFK experts in the country. I spoke about the Times and Big Media's role in the Kennedy cover-up.

Here is my speech:

We’re Winning – and Losing – the JFK Media War

Thank you, Ben Wecht and thanks to the staff of the Cyril Wecht Institute. I regret that I can’t be in Pittsburgh in person. I may be virtual, but I’m live from San Francisco.

I will keep my remarks fairly brief as I close out this very informative conference today. I know you’re all rushing to return home. But I do want to leave you with something provocative. So here goes.

“History,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the White House aide to President Kennedy and Harvard historian, was fond of saying, “is an ongoing argument.”

No subject embroils academics and journalists more than the JFK assassination, even 60 years later. But the American people are a different story. There, a substantial majority has long been of one mind.

Poll after poll ever since the shots rang out in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza has showed that most Americans believe President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. According to a new Gallup survey, the percentage of lone gunman skeptics remains a solid 65% of adult Americans, with the largest numbers of those skeptics pointing at the federal government (20%) and specifically the CIA (16%) as the likely culprits – numbers that are sharply up in recent years.

Despite this unshakeable public conviction, and a growing body of evidence to the contrary, the U. S. media has remained stubbornly even perversely wedded to the single assassin version of Dallas. The Guardian, one of the more liberal newspapers in the English-language world, just ran a worshipful profile of aging Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who still clings to the tattered Warren Report, despite (among other recent revelations) his former Secret Service colleague Paul Landis’s assertion that there was nothing “magic” about the magic bullet at all.

Shaking his head sagely, Guardian correspondent David Smith opined, “In an age of division, disinformation and internet-fueled movements such as QAnon, conspiracy theories about who killed Kennedy and why are thriving as never before.”

I would bet that David Smith has barely cracked the surface of the JFK story. Journalists for the mainstream press routinely offer their judgments on subjects they know little about. Newspaper and TV reporters are captives of relentless deadlines and a pack mentality. Despite their feisty reputations and their insatiable habit of awarding themselves with prizes, they are a timid lot. They are loath to bite the hands that feed them. This story is so epic – involving a brazen assault on American democracy – you would think the Fourth Estate would show a little humility in its ignorance. It never has.

As I wrote in my book The Devils’ Chessboard, Cold War-era national security officials like Allen Dulles enjoyed a cozy relationship with the corporate media. Dulles, the CIA director linked by me and other historians with the JFK assassination and cover-up, got himself appointed to the Warren Commission, playing so active a role that some observers said it should have been called the Dulles Commission.

After the Warren Report was released in 1964, Newsweek national affairs editor John Jay Iselin sent Dulles a gushing note, thanking him for helping the magazine direct its coverage of the report’s 26 volumes on a tight deadline. Newsweek’s cover story on the Warren Report, Iselin told Dulles “was made easier through your kindness in giving us some idea of what to be on the watch for.”

Dulles was on a nickname basis with New York Times executives and journalists throughout his career. When Dulles was named CIA director in 1953, Times general manager Julius Ochs Adler – “Julie,” as Dulles affectionately called him – warmly congratulated his friend “Allie.” Times columnist C. L. Sulzberger was also a reliable advocate during Dulles’s reign as spymaster, with Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame later exposing their close connection in a Rolling Stone investigative article about the CIA’s media assets.

These days the press is so close to the national security state that the CIA doesn’t need a clandestine program like Operation Mockingbird to infiltrate it. Every night you can see a parade of former CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon officials on liberal news networks like MSNBC or CNN.

Essentially, from Ukraine to China to the Middle East, the corporate media acts as a mouthpiece for U.S. empire. National security reporters soon learn that there is no access for them in Langley and Washington if they don’t report the official line. It’s clear to them: no access, no career.

What the press conveniently forgets, in its disdain for the “conspiracy culture,” is that the American people have been lied to by their government (and the obedient media) time after time. From Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin to Iran-Contra to 9/11 to WMD -- to Trump and Biden’s presidential decisions to allow the CIA to illegally keep secret some 4,000 government documents related to the Kennedy assassination.

A message to David Smith and the rest of the smug press corps: this refusal to come clean about some of our biggest national traumas is what has led to widespread public skepticism about authorities, about official pronouncements. There is a direct line between these government lies and the growth of QAnon and other crazy subcultures.

By the way, some conspiracy theories are cracked. And some are true. Do you think power prefers to operate in the open?

Now for some good news. As I’ve long observed, quoting Leonard Cohen, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. The official version of what happened six decades ago in Dallas is so widely rejected, is so patently absurd, that even the Big Media is catching up to the truth.

It’s a mixed bag this anniversary season. Yes, we have useful idiots like the Guardian’s David Smith. But we also have documentaries like JFK: What the Doctors Saw on Paramount+, the blunt eyewitness testimony of several members of the surgical team that worked on the mortally-wounded Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital and saw with their own trained eyes that he had been struck by bullets from the front and rear. In other words, clear evidence of a conspiracy.

On the November 22 anniversary, we can watch on several streaming platforms the opening episode of Four Died Trying, a documentary series on the history-changing assassinations of the 1960s. This month, there is also the multipart podcast Who Killed JFK? produced by Hollywood actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner, who teamed up with longtime Kennedy assassination author Dick Russell.

You can also detect a slow movement in the right direction by the corporate press. In recent months, Peter Baker, the New York Times’s White House correspondent, has covered two important developments in the Kennedy case, the Landis revelation about the magic bullet and the discovery that the CIA was secretly reading Oswald’s mail before the Kennedy assassination. This was an eye-popping story because the agency had long claimed that Oswald was off its radar before the assassination -- a dubious assertion about a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, threatening to reveal military secrets, and then returned to this country with a Russian wife. Baker is clearly open to new information about the JFK case.

And New York magazine recently featured a generally positive profile of JFK expert Jefferson Morley, the dogged journalist who sometimes succeeds in making the mainstream press do its job --- though strangely the magazine’s editors chose to delete the positive quotes about Morley from other Kennedy authorities.

Despite this flirtation with the truth, the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media remain largely wedded to the official version of Dallas. Last week, I was asked by a Times opinion editor to write a JFK assassination op-ed – a landmark event considering my reputation. Unfortunately, the newspaper of record rejected my measured article. “The piece is rich and fascinating,” the editor emailed me, “but I don't think I can move forward with it. The fascinating mobius strip of truth and conspiracy is very tricky for Times Opinion.” Whatever that means.

So, yes, the mainstream press is, let’s say kindly, a work in progress as we near the 60th milestone of the JFK assassination. The news media is still trailing far behind public opinion, even the Times Opinion section.

But if the mainstream press’s progress has been slow – some would say glacial -- Hollywood, unfortunately, is even worse. The dream factory is where the truth goes to die. And the entertainment industry has even more power to shape public consciousness than the daily news barrage.

After Oliver Stone’s explosive movie JFK was released in 1991, the CIA reportedly vowed that another film like that – which blamed Kennedy’s murder on powerful government plotters -- would never be made. The agency was right. The CIA now operates a branch office in Hollywood which has done a very effective job at making sure that U.S. spies are portrayed in a heroic light and in canceling screen projects which take a different view.

After they were published, my New York Times-bestselling books – Brothers, on Robert Kennedy’s hidden search for the truth about the murder of his brother, and The Devil’s Chessboard, about the rise of Allen Dulles and his central involvement in the JFK assassination – were optioned by major studios and filmmakers. But neither book has come close to reaching the screen. “They’ll never make your books in Hollywood,” Oliver Stone told me several years ago. So far, he’s been right.

What I’m about to tell you is painful. Darkly comic. Sure, it happens every day in Hollywood – after all, it’s Hollywood, Jake. But there’s a political dimension to my frustration. Yes, Oliver was probably right – they’ll never make movies or TV shows from my books. Or from anyone’s books, if you tell the truth about the Kennedy assassination.

A few years ago, I was sitting at a studio conference table with big producers and a major left-wing director. They wanted our feature to say the Mafia killed JFK, case closed. Wellll, I said, organized crime did play a role – gangsters are often recruited by the CIA to do the spy agency’s dirty work. But, as my books demonstrate, Dallas was a national security operation. The movie producers just looked at me like I wasn’t getting it. Later, the director said to me on the phone: We both know it’s bullshit. But let’s take the money and run. I didn’t. Now I hear director Barry Levinson and writer David Mamet are making a new movie. It says gangsters killed Kennedy. That one is getting made.

Hollywood continues to confound me and thwart me. Continues to buy the rights to my books and do nothing with them. I was raised there. My father Lyle Talbot was a cofounder of the Screen Actors Guild. My son Joe Talbot is the widely acclaimed director of The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I’ve learned how to write fiction and screenplays.

I even collaborated with Oliver Stone on a screenplay. That’s right. It hasn’t gone in front of the cameras yet. Maybe it will someday.

Yes, we must admit – we’ve been losing the big media war. The corporate news media has been slow, very slow, to let in the light. And Hollywood, the other communications bastion, remains a twilight zone, a largely impregnable fortress. The land of superhero spies and fantastical propaganda.

So, what should we do at this point? Sixty years later. When the White House still sides with the CIA, in brazen violation of the law, and keeps some 4,000 documents about the Kennedy assassination secret. When our vigilant, watchdog press rouses itself and growls… “Oh, well. So it goes.”

By the way, while researching my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA and State Department for the travel records and passport history of William Harvey. He was the assassinations chief for the CIA during the Cold War and a Kennedy hater. Before the JFK assassination, Harvey was spotted by his CIA deputy flying from Rome, where he was stationed at the time, to Dallas. A court ruled that the government could keep Harvey’s travel records hidden, though he died many years ago.

So, given all this official stonewalling, what should we do? Keep doing it ourselves. Keep ignoring the government and the big media gatekeepers. If the New York publishers and Hollywood studios persist in blocking us, we’ll keep going around them with podcasts and blogs and documentaries. That’s what we’ve always done.

If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own. That’s what Scoop Nisker, the late great San Francisco radio host, used to say.

I have a saying of my own – The best story wins. We have the truth on our side. And guess what? It’s a much better story.

Keep saying what the New York Times doesn’t want to hear. Keep digging up information that will never get you on CNN.

Someday our citizens army will win.

Let me add one final comment as we depart. With apologies to my good friend Jeff Morley, who has done so much to advance the JFK case. Jeff spoke earlier today. It was a very good speech, but I must disagree with one of his statements. When it comes to understanding this murder most foul, we are more than just “warm.” We are hot, very hot.

Yes, there are crucial gaps in our understanding of the crime – like the names of the snipers who shot the president and who exactly financed the operation. But we know the larger truth. Top officials in the CIA and military organized the killing of President Kennedy and its cover-up. They killed him because JFK was trying to wind down the Cold War and was threatening the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower belatedly warned the American people about. In other words, Kennedy was confronting a very lucrative racket. We’ve been at war ever since Dallas.

In 2019, a list of prominent Americans signed a so-called Truth and Reconciliation public statement, which said in part: “A growing body of evidence strongly indicates that the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at high levels of the U.S. power structure, and was implemented by top elements of the U.S. national security apparatus using, among others, figures in the criminal underworld to help carry out the crime and cover-up.”

This powerful and definitive statement, which I helped organize, was signed among others by G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the House Assassinations Committee; Dr. Robert McClelland of the Parkland Memorial Hospital surgical team; Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; former Secret Service hero Abraham Bolden; and a who’s-who list of leading JFK researchers including Dr. Cyril Wecht, Dr. Gary Aguilar, James Douglass, Peter Dale Scott; Rex Bradford; James DiEugenio; John Newman – and yes, Jeff Morley.

Sixty years after Dallas, let’s state loudly and clearly what we know. Even when the mainstream press and Hollywood refuse to listen.

The truth will out.

Thank you.

Season of the Gun

I've written extensively about how the power elite and its security agencies have historically maintained their rule by infiltrating progressive movements and by assassinating our leaders. This is the season of the gun -- the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination (more on that mother of conspiracies on Monday) and one that Bay Area radicals of a certain age will remember -- the 50th anniversary of the assassination of progressive educator Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of the Oakland CA public school district. Foster's killing was carried out by the strange radical cult known as the Symbionese Liberation Army, which the leftwing sociologist Todd Gitlin later called "the graveyard of the Bay Area left."

Gitlin was right. I was a Berkeley radical when the SLA burst on the scene with its bizarre targeting of Foster. And I wrote about the SLA years later in my book Season of the Witch. It was a deeply dispiriting time, after the ecstatic hopes and dreams of the '60s.

In his excellent podcast "East Bay Yesterday," my friend Liam O'Donoghue talks to the Oakland curator of a recent exhibit on Marcus Foster and then to me, about 30 minutes in.

Knock me your 'lobes...

Marcus Foster