Posted on

Richard C. Nagell is a clue to the JFK assassination

Here’s a rare photo of Richard Case Nagell coming to court in handcuffs. Nagell was a spook with a long history of mental instability and spent decades applying for disability before he finally got it. During the Korean War he got field-promoted to captain at the record-breaking age of 20, so you know he was considered competent.

Two months before Kennedy’s assassination, Nagell walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas, flourished a revolver and fired two shots into the wall. He then walked outside to his vehicle and waited for the police. When they arrived, Nagell invited them to inspect his trunk, which contained a Minolta spy camera and miniature darkroom kit, notebook with Fair Play for Cuba contacts, phone numbers of CIA officers in Los Angeles and names of KGB agents in Mexico. “I’d rather be arrested than commit murder and treason,” said Nagell to the police while being handcuffed.

Nagell was sentenced to ten years for attempted bank robbery and served five for a crime he never fully explained, but later said he thought it would be a simple misdemeanor and not taken so seriously. Nagell claimed to have mailed a letter to J. Edgar Hoover around this time outlining the plot against Kennedy, but received no reply. Nagell made a number of claims of holding evidence that never appeared.
Jim Garrison decided not to call Nagell to the witness stand during his famous trial of Clay Shaw in 1967. Garrison made the first legitimate attempt to bring forth justice but was blocked and stonewalled at every turn by the CIA. And he knew he was being led from all directions into rabbit holes salted with timebombs, and probably suspected Nagell might be one of those.

According to Nagell, after being approached by an East German spook, he was told to double down by his American handlers, so he became a triple agent, a very complex and psychologically-demanding position, but one offering a unique view on world events. While working as a pro-Marxist infiltrator in Mexico and New Orleans, Nagell stumbled into the Kennedy plot and was allegedly told by his Communist handlers to kill Oswald to prevent the assassination (many Communists looked upon Kennedy as a potential ally). The problem with this story is there were two previous attempts planned prior to Dallas.

Dick Russell wrote the book on Nagell (The Man Who Knew Too Much) and it really opened a lot of doors into the assassination for me. Russell was also the first to visit Win Scott’s family and get the story of Scott’s feud with James Angleton over the investigation. Scott was likely killed after he tried to leave the agency after collecting evidence Oswald was a secret agent and not a lone assassin.

If you search online, you can find a bunch of Nagell’s correspondence. He sometimes wrote to friends and to the media and also to Russell himself. Many of these letters are highly entertaining and show an obvious insider knowledge into the workings at the CIA headquarters in Langley.

Nagell died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on November 1st, 1995, and since he lived longer than any other whistleblower, and since nothing substantial ever emerged from any of his revelations, I think it’s safe to say at this point Nagell was a rabbit hole and not a true whistle-blower. But that’s how it goes in the wilderness of mirrors, where up is down, and left is right.

(Excerpted from Killing Kennedy: The Real Story)

Posted on

The George Bush connections to JFK’s assassination

I guess you know Dealey Plaza was flooded with spooks 50 years ago. One young spook at the scene may have been George H.W. Bush, who was working deep cover for the CIA through his fledgling oil company Zapata, building platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, some of which were designed as resupply depots for the anti-Castro network operating out of Miami. The Miami CIA office had become the biggest in the world outside Langley and they had been training an army of refugees to re-take Cuba from the commies. Check out the picture of someone who looks just like Bush in front of the School Book Depository. By the way, Bush says he “can’t remember” where he was when JFK was murdered, despite several FBI memos relating his interest in the case. Also, if that isn’t Bush standing on the steps of the Depository, whoever it might be has never come forward to clear Bush from any involvement.

William “Wild Bill” Harvey

A very important and very secret CIA operation against Cuba involved the CIA’s most gung-ho boom-and-bang cowboy, William “Wild Bill” Harvey teaming up with mafia assassin Johnny Roselli to kill Castro, a mission JFK apparently decided to shut down after the Cuban missile crisis. Both Bush and Roselli developed a fondness for the speed boats used to ferry weapons and explosives into Cuba. But when JFK discovered the CIA’s anti-Castro operations weren’t being shut down, he forcibly closed the training camps and told James Angleton to fire William Harvey.

Instead, Harvey was quietly moved to Italy and then secretly consulted for the JFK hit. There were a lot of CIA people in Dallas that day, although most may not have know much about what was about to happen. In the CIA everything tends to get compartmentalized and very much on the “need to know” basis.

The first piece of evidence to tie Bush to the assassination was a memo written by J. Edgar Hoover the day after the assassination that revealed “George Bush of the CIA” reported by phone on the activities of some “misguided Cubans.” One wonders what the purpose of this memo was? Was Hoover tying a Bush family member into the scene to cover his own ass? I guess you know CIA Cuban exiles provided the support team that assisted JFK’s CIA-mob assassination team. And it’s only because of the testimony of some mob figures and Cuban exiles that we know what happened that day as no one from inside the CIA has ever spoken out, or at least spoken out and lived. But then something even more interesting turned up more recently.

This memo was written the day of the assassination and claims private citizen George Bush called the FBI immediately after the assassination to point a finger at a student named James Parrott. Was this call really placed from Tyler, Texas, and how easy would it have been to place a call from a hotel in Dallas and route it through an office in Tyler for the sole purpose of giving Bush an alibi?

No doubt Harvey assisted Angleton in building the MI5-CIA-Mossad-Vatican alliance, a base that gave him immense influence. Even after Angleton was removed as head of counterintelligence (and painted as a paranoid fool by many inside the agency), he could not be fired nor fully retired as his field operatives were just too important.

Roselli was not so lucky. After participating in the JFK assassination and helping with the coverup, Roselli thought he was untouchable. He was railroaded into jail and while there spilled the beans on the assassination. When he got out he would turn up in pieces in an oil drum floating in Biscayne Bay, where he had once raced his favorite speed boat on runs to Cuba and back. Knowing Handsome Johnny’s penchant for profit, one might assume Johnny was running guns and explosives one way, while bringing drugs back the other.

Posted on

Masonry is a clue to the JFK and Lincoln assassinations

I don’t practice spiritual intolerance, so I have deep respect for the Masonic traditions, just as I respect the histories of all the major religions that support peace, non-violence and the brotherhood of all mankind under the eye of the Great Spirit that Runs through All Things.

But if you have an understanding of the history of Freemasonry, it becomes clear the JFK and Lincoln assassinations are peppered with high-ranking members of the craft holding down strategic positions at crucial vantage points, which is not to blame masonry, just to point out the obvious.

There’s a lot of angles to this story, but one thing to keep in mind is that at the time of Kennedy’s murder, there was supposedly no love lost between Masons and Catholics in the USA. Several Popes had issued edicts to forbid Catholics from participating in the “satanic” ceremonies of Freemasonry, possibly because Masons had the audacity to put a Koran and Torah on the altar alongside the Bible.

However, we know now this was always a hoodwink because so many high-ranking Catholic officials in Italy turned up on the membership list of Propaganda Due, a highly secretive masonic lodge with links to the CIA that plotted false flag terror events to be blamed on Communists so as to turn the Italian people away from Marxism.

After Lincoln was assassinated many books were written attempting to prove the Vatican had been behind the plot, although it’s hard to say what the Pope’s motivation would have been, and the first was suspiciously written by the military trial judge, who was most likely trying to worm his way out of complicity in the cover-up after most of the trial witnesses were exposed as perjurers.

Original East India Co. flag

Many people realize our Revolution was organized almost entirely by Freemasons, but the truth is very complicated because while there was a renegade lodge in Boston that plotted the tea party that included Paul Revere as a member,  most lodges during the Revolution were packed with Tories and stayed loyal to the Crown throughout the war, and maybe even afterwards if they were doing business with the powerful East India Company, which was undoubtedly being run by Masons. Is it worth noting that the original flag to have 13 red and white alternating stripes was the flag of the East India Company?

Of course, the most prominent Mason in America at the time was George Washington, and he led one of those renegade rebel lodges and invested Masonry with tremendous sparkle and that’s likely why our Capitol is so incredibly Masonic. The second most prominent American mason was Benjamin Franklin, and he definitely turned out to be a British spy, and is celebrated today in England for his loyalty to the crown.

Before he got disappeared, Charles Beard was considered the greatest historian of Colonial times, but that all changed after he published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, a meticulous examination of how the banking interests steered the composition of that precious document to serve their interests, and not for the rights of man in general.

William Morgan

In 1826, a whistle-blower named William Morgan suddenly emerged to announce Masonry was a plot by the British to manipulate the country from within, a plan that was working and had already infested the upper reaches of finance, government, law enforcement and the military. Well, Morgan was suddenly arrested on trumped-up charges and put in jail, but whoops, he mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth while in police custody. And all the police involved are Masons and so is the Judge and the entire Grand Jury that has been called. This was just too obvious a cover-up of immense proportions. Well, the ensuing outcry over the cover-up unexpectedly reached epidemic proportions creating the first third party in America, the single-issue Anti-Masonic Party, whose goal was to elect anybody to any office but a Mason, and especially police and judges. Among its leaders was John Quincy Adams, one of the more powerful Boston Brahmins.

Harry S. Truman

Needless to say, Freemasonry was forced to get more secret and had to lie low after that fiasco, and it even seems possible someone might have immediately created Mormonism (which looks a lot like Masonry) as a possible fall-back position in case the craft had to be abandoned. And I say that because Morgan’s widow married into Mormonism and was one of the founder’s many wives. Regular readers may recall my blog concerning the vaporous nature of secret societies and how they can disappear effortlessly by sliding inside a new entity, like some alien life form.

But that wasn’t necessary because the Masonic scare blew over quick, and Masons were able to win the next election and wound up electing a remarkable string of Masons to the highest office in the land, including Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt and, most important, a former hat salesman named Harry Truman. You see, it was very important the 33rd President be a Mason, especially if he was just a lowly clerk from a Midwestern haberdashery.

Posted on

The Manchurian Candidate

Richard Condon was a publicist for Walt Disney, who was a paid informant and eventually special secret agent for the FBI for 26 years. Walt was a close associate of J. Edgar Hoover. They were both 33rd degree Freemasons. I don’t know if Condon was a Freemason, but he obviously garnered a glimpse into the secret society networks of the oligarchy, as evidenced in his greatest work.

We know Disney submitted scripts to Hoover, who was a master of propaganda. Hoover carefully created his own myth as the greatest law enforcement fighter in America, even to the point of destroying careers that threatened to eclipse him (just ask Melvin Purvis). Disney allowed Hoover to make any changes necessary to keep a pro-capitalism subtext on point.

Condon must have found out about MK/Ultra, because he wrote a shattering novel on mind control long before most Americans had even heard about the effects of drugs on hypnosis. It started with the alleged brainwashing of American prisoners of war in Korea, many of whom were filmed making anti-US statements while in captivity.

The actual technologies shown in Condon’s book and movie were first pioneered in Nazi Germany, not Korea or China. That research was imported into the USA at Fort Detrick by Sidney Gottlieb, who subsidized the research of Dr. Jolly West, a professor at Cornell using a CIA cutout company called the Human Ecology Fund.

One wonders if West knew the reason many pilots confessed to being war criminals is because some were involved in secretly spraying chemical agents on North Koreans. West did a massive study on the subject for the Pentagon that failed to mention this element of the story, while attempting to get the men off the hook by claiming their confessions were a result of what became known later as “Stockholm syndrome.”

West worked extensively with drugs and hypnosis and most of his subjects had no idea they were actually mind control guinea pigs. He implanted fake memories and erased real memories, and the creation and management of cults became his specialty. West became linked with Jack Ruby, Sirhan Sirhan, Patti Hearst, Timothy McVeigh and many others.

Jolly became an expert in the creation of cults, and set up a hippie crash pad in the Haight for his secret mind control experiments. Since he predicted the rise of violent cults out of the hippie scene, it was likely his own program is what he was talking about. Manson was moved into the Haight at the same time, and my guess is he became Jolly’s masterpiece, although Dr. Frankenstein never took credit for the monster, for obvious reasons. But we do know Jolly had mastered the art of creating robot slaves who could foment immense violence while programmed not to feel a thing.

My guess is Jolly set up a trolling operation for easily hypnotized teenage girls, runaways escaping abuse looking for a new father. A collection of these would quickly gather around Manson and do anything he asked. Manson, meanwhile, had become an overnight master of cultic programming, and much of his paradigm was lifted straight from the Process Church. The Process wrote the script, but were harmless monks searching for enlightenment while being led off a cliff into the dark abyss. But their philosophies were extremely effective in building Manson’s cult, and I have to think this is not an accident, but result of MI6 and CIA working hand in glove.

In all likelihood, Lee Harvey Oswald was an early MK/Ultra subject. His hypnosis obviously wasn’t strong enough to get him to kill a man he respected, which may be why Oswald wasn’t a shooter, but if you look close into Oswald’s history, you’ll find mind control doctors likely got a hold of him in New York City before he was a teenager, and later, when he moved back to New Orleans he was probably re-hypnotized by David Ferrie while serving as a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol. There’s an important element in Condon’s book: the title character has no father, just like Oswald. The father is the most important element in a young man’s psyche, and if you capture that archetype, you can construct a zombie robot.

The book was a sensation in Washington DC, but no one expected anyone to make it into a film. It only happened because Sinatra loved the book, and may have even been introduced to it by JFK while they were still buddies, before the President broke off contact. The first thing Sinatra did when the film deal fell into place was call JFK, and the first thing JFK wanted to know was: “Who’s going to play the mother?” In the book, the mother mainlines heroin in between meetings with the Pope and sexual encounters with her robot son. The mother is also a prominent member of the Order of the Eastern Star, a secret society created for the wives and daughters of high ranking Freemasons, although that detail was left out of the film. The headquarters of that order, by the way, is a temple located on DuPont Circle in Washington, which leads me to suspect the DuPont family may have an interest in Freemasonry.

After too many people got wind of MK/Ultra, an investigation followed in Congress, one carefully controlled by Rockefeller, whose family may have had the most to lose if the shit ever hit the fan. Richard Helms burned the files in his fireplace and never paid any price for committing that crime. What little we know comes mostly from financial records Helms missed.

One thing you can be sure of: these technologies have been off-loaded to private corporations and taken out of the country. I would surmise many notorious terror cells operating today are under some form of intel brainwashing.

The film was made in 1962, but was pulled almost immediately as it carried too many connections to the JFK assassination. In the book, the assassin is supposed to kill the president so the vice president can assume power.

The book may more complicated than most believe. Although it paints Marco as the hero, in fact, you can also read Marco as another Manchurian Candidate whose real mission is baby-sitting the assassin and making sure the job takes place, which involves changing the target to kill the mother, as she had slipped off her Communist leash.

Early on, Marco happens to run into a beautiful woman on a train, who speaks in code, forms a sudden attraction to him, and has a close friend in military intelligence, who sets up a huge operation to assist Marco overnight. This women may be Marco’s CIA handler and not some accidental acquaintance. Maybe Condon knew Communism was a scam from day one and the Cold War a psyop. He certainly left a few clues.

Posted on

Shamans versus Sorcerers

Not too long ago, an elaborate theory was put forth claiming the JFK assassination was a Masonic ritual. Much of this had to so with randomly selected numbers, like the parallel of Dallas and the dates involved, etc. It was an obvious numerology rabbit hole with zero useful information. Which is not to say Masonry isn’t the largest of the secret societies the oligarchy controls, but that when crimes are committed, you have to study the codes and apply evidence that contributes to a conviction. Otherwise, you are spreading useless paranoia. And that pretty much sums up the Tin Foil Hat Patrol.

One thing for sure, the JFK hit was run through JM/Wave, and it wasn’t being set-up around a Masonic code. It was being set-up with the assistance of the Chicago outfit to happen whenever the conditions were favorable and they could get a clear shot.

Since J. Edgar Hoover was a devoted Freemason, and staffed the upper levels of the FBI almost exclusively with masons, and even held masonic ceremonies inside his building, you’d think the masonic magic connections to the assassination would be well-grounded. The reality, however, is that once the contract went out, hit teams were assembled in a variety of cities (Giancana said seven in all), and JFK was tracked everywhere he went. The hit could have taken place in any of those seven cities.

So I took the ritual magic conspiracy stories involving the JFK assassination as jive, and can’t help but notice these sorts of stories are suddenly amplifying immensely. And if they aren’t blaming the grandmaster of masonic magic, Albert Pike, then the theories point to Aleister Crowley, the grandmaster of Satanism.

There’s all types of magic and energy comes in flavors, especially telepathic energies, which are magical because we can’t see, touch or taste them, although we can feel them. Telepathic energy and magic move through us naturally, and manifest ceremony and ritual whether we realize it or not.

Most scientists aren’t interested in telepathic energies, so little is known for sure. Secret science was studied by the Nazis and then the results imported secretly into the CIA.

The global situation is a fixed game for generating profit to the coffers of the oligarchy.

The CIA and their Foundations have spent billions studying mind control technology and mass propaganda techniques  over the decades, the results of which are in constant daily use by the global corporations as they build brands while hiding secret monopolies.

Peace magic and love vibrations are the flip side of Dark Magic. Love is non-violent will never seek control, while Dark magic, on the other hand, is always about bending others to your will.

One is about respecting the tribe, the other about making the tribe respect you.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a peace shaman.

Unfortunately, it seems to be written somewhere that the sorcerer will slay the peace shaman. And this will not end until we can protect the peace shamans, something that can only happen by exposing the sorcerers among us.

President Bush read a children’s book about a pet goat during 9/11. The goat symbolizes Satan and is a psychological lever. Well, perhaps that’s true, or perhaps Bush introduced this detail as a rabbit hole. Every detail of the event can be staged, just as every random coincidence can become a deflection away from the truth.

If only everyone would agree to the one sacred rule: Don’t hurt anybody. Then world peace might actually manifest. I mean, how hard can that be?

Posted on

Surfing the Mind Control Matrix

Ever wonder why the media has fallen into the ownership of only a handful of corporations? That’s because the media is the key programming tool used to manage our collective archetypes, having replaced religion in that role since the arrival of television.

There’s a good reason why most Americans distrust hippies, and that’s because the archetype created in the media was intentionally negative. This campaign started even before the hippies arrived, when their immediate predecessors, beatniks, came into public consciousness. The entire beatnik phenomenon was orchestrated in large part by Allen Ginsberg and the Village Voice, in response to the Jack Kerouac/Neal Cassady adoration societies that emerged after the publication of On the Road. That book introduced concepts of Eastern religion while encouraging the ritual use of cannabis and alcohol to achieve enlightenment.

Because of its revolutionary message and popularity, On the Road needed to be co-opted but quick. In television, the beatnik archetype first appeared as the bumbling Maynard G. Krebs, but eventually, Kerouac’s buddy bromace morphed into the politically and spiritually empty Route 66, a show more designed around selling Corvettes than preaching enlightenment.

In analyzing the real seats of international power, one cannot overestimate the role of secret societies to create and forge new archetypes, as well as manage their depictions in the media.

In this regard, J. Edgar Hoover certainly played a key gatekeeper role throughout most of his professional career. When he was 26 years old, Hoover joined the Washington Lodge of the Scottish-Rite Freemasons and his early career was marked by his clever exploitation of a string of terrorist attacks. Without those terror attacks, Hoover would not have been able to armchair himself into control of that American gestapo known as the FBI.

Clint Eastwood’s film on Hoover has just appeared on HBO and I watched the film with great interest. Unfortunately, it is based mostly on Hoover’s own self-serving accounts of his rise to power and fame, and only hints at the deeper corruption.

Although it may seem strange, aside from Freemasonry, Hoover’s other network of influence appeared to be the Catholic Church, which rewarded Hoover for a lifetime of devoted service, even though he was a German protestant by birth. Freemasons were supposed to be opposed to the Catholic Church, but over history some lodges actually wondered if they’d fallen prey to secret Jesuit control. (In today’s world, that role is played by Opus Dei, currently the most powerful secret society inside the Vatican.) And Hoover was not the only key person inside the national security apparatus who enjoyed a close relationship with the Vatican. James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA’s counter-intelligence operations certainly comes to mind in this regard.

Archetypes are often employed to help move populations toward war, which is the primary means of achieving quick profits as well as keeping people following orders. The traumas inflicted by war and terror are key to advancing the mind control matrix, which runs mostly on shock and awe.

Our current war is obviously constructed around a Christian/Jewish versus Muslim confrontation. However, since the Muslim resources are so small in comparison to the Christian/Jewish empires, this necessitates a new form of war based around terror instead of standing armies. It’s all very similar, in fact, to the sort of terror that cleared Hoover’s path to power. At some point in time, people are going to have to consider the possibility that much of the so-called “left-wing” terror that has been perpetrated over the years has actually been false-flag attacks designed to advance right-wing agendas.

Posted on

MacBird!: little-known masterpiece of counterculture literature

After JFK was assassinated, the country went into deep shock. Very few people wanted to dwell on the event, or even consider evidence of CIA involvement. In fact, the mood of the country was similar to the post 9/11 environment, which left many people unable and unwilling to consider alternative conspiracy theories other than Osama bin Laden did it.

In any major crime, however, the key is to examine who benefited, and nobody benefited more from the JFK assassination than Lyndon Baines Johnson, an intensely corrupt politician who knew about the event in advance, although he certainly lacked sufficient power to pull it off on his own. In fact, had JFK not been assassinated, Johnson would likely have been jailed due to an ongoing investigation into bribes he’d accepted, a story that wouldn’t fully surface until after his death.

Barbara Garson was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In August of 1965, she was speaking at an anti-war rally in Berkeley, when she called the new First Lady: “Lady MacBird Johnson.” This slip-of-the-tongue inspired Garson to write a Shakespearean parody based around the Kennedy assassination and the first staged reading of this masterpiece of counterculture literature actually occurred at the Channing-Murray Foundation run by the Unitarian Church in Urbana, Illinois, an event that cemented that church as the beachhead for the blossoming anti-war movement in central Illinois.

The lead character of MacBird was played by none other than my cohort at the time, Brian Ravlin, who I’d first met when he appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Urbana Junior High with my brother, Paul.  Brian had dropped out of high school and gone to San Francisco in search of Bugsy’s brother Don. When he reappeared in Urbana a year later, he seemed an entirely new person.

A few days before the show opened, Brian dropped by the high school to visit me and a cheerleader girl squirted him in the face with a squirt gun as a joke. Brian had a huge Afro-like haircut and immense, shaggy sideburns at the time (see picture above). In fact, he was probably the most wildly-flamboyant counterculture character in Champaign-Urbana at the time, although Carl Ellis (Old Carlo) would soon surpass Brian in that regard.

Anyway, Brian laughed and gave that girl a little spank on her rear with a spiral notebook he was holding, either his latest poetry or notes for his script. Smitty’s son might have been the girl’s boyfriend, they certainly ran with the same crowd, for when he saw Brian slap her butt, he just reared back and blindsided Brian with a sucker punch to the face that knocked Brian off his feet and landed him flat on his back. The teacher quickly rushed Smitty’s son into the classroom and started class as if nothing had happened. I don’t remember much of what followed, other than I went into a slow-boiling rage because nothing was being done since Smitty (the football coach) was the most powerful figure in school. Brian went home and his mom took him to the hospital to get him checked out.

Like most people at the time, I was also having trouble thinking about CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination. A few others around me were already deep into the citizen research movement (which is the real reason we know the truth today; the government has done nothing but cover-up the trails). But I was stunned by this staged reading, and immediately accepted the transparent truth that life is a giant wheel and the same stories go round and round. Suddenly it was clear the Macbeth tragedy was obviously being played out with new characters in our own time. After watching the show, it became difficult not to become a citizen researcher and I started reading everything I could find on the assassination.

And who do you think played the character of Ken O’Dunc? Why, none other than Eric Swenson, founder of the Finchley Boys, who helped spark the local garage rock movement and then had drifted into acting. In fact, Eric was probably the best actor in the production and was playing the Kennedy role because he could do a perfect JFK imitation, Boston accent and all. Eric had always worshiped Kennedy and no one was more depressed about the assassination than he. Eric even had a portrait of JFK on the wall in his house. I’d already started my own underground newspaper after getting kicked out of the Knight Riders for taking LSD (only a few months later, my former band members turned into huge pot-heads and acid freaks…they even offered to let me back into the band, but I’d already moved on).

“The performance was directed by Iva Martirano,” recalls Judith Lewis, who played one of the witches. “She founded the Roundhouse Players and staged a number of other avant-gardish productions using Urbana High and U of I students. She was the wife of Salvatore Martirano who was a composer of electronic music on the faculty with John Cage.”

I recently went back to take a look at MacBird and rediscovered its brilliance. I think it’d be a popular play today if not for the ending: Bobby Kennedy avenges his brother’s death. In the script, Ted Kennedy appears with a cast on his arm and Garson makes it clear the Kennedy’s believe Johnson is trying to have them killed as well. Little did we know Bobby would go down within a few years.

For the most part, the script is written in Shakespearean couplets and many of the longer speeches are modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies. The characters dress in modern suits, except for a colorful plume in their fedoras and tiny toy swords affixed to their waists. Eventually, MacBird became a huge hit on Broadway, launching the career of Stacy Keach.

I kinda wish Garson would revisit this project and update the script with the latest revelations. Certainly the trio of James Angleton, Bill Harvey and Johnny Roselli would make a wonderful addition as primary instigators and eventual assassins. The trio should be forced to keep killing more and more people, and eventually even Roselli, to keep a lid on the conspiracy.

Allen Dulles and J Edgar Hoover would be the masters of the coverup. Kennedy’s conflict with the Texas oil cowboys as well as the Eastern Federal Reserve need to be spelled out. And, of course, Johnson must voluntarily give up the throne (and then watch Bobby Kennedy get killed by a Dulles-Angleton goon anyway). In the end, MacBird goes back to the ranch in a deep depression and dies relatively young while tremendously unhappy.

Our local production of MacBird was a transforming event in central Illinois and one I still think about. We already had John Cage producing his greatest happenings in our town, I was running the biggest counterculture publication in downstate Illinois at the age of 17, and the Finchley Boys were rapidly becoming one of the most famous garage bands in the State.

But we also had some leaders on the other side of the fence, including the mysterious Professor Revilo P. Oliver, whose name spells the same both ways, and who was the leading pundit of the John Birch Society at the time, the first person to announce a conspiracy coverup in the JFK assassination within days of the event, and a person who probably should have been fired from the University for anti-Jewish rantings, but never was. In Revilo’s world view, the Jews were behind the Communists, who were behind everything else, including the shadow government. Today, I view the John Birch Society as an intelligence operation, not a legitimate citizen’s group, just based on their controversial history and heavy involvement in obvious disinfo. Revilo would eventually split from the Birch Society and join the violent White Power movement, undoubtedly another intelligence op.

In another weird twist, Johnny Roselli, one of JFK’s assassins, was passing through town frequently at the time to visit his lover, owner of the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette, a newspaper I worked for on week-ends to make pocket money.

I just wish Garson (or someone else) would come up with a play like MacBird only about 9/11 because we sure need something to break down the walls of resistance to truth that have been erected to protect the guilty.

(Excerpted from Magic, Religion and Cannabis.)