The Charlotte News

Friday, June 6, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The editorial column begins to take on a very different viewpoint and stress now from Cash's time as associate editor. Thus far, the war and foreign affairs suddenly cease to exist insofar as prompting any comment. The stress in that regard appears entirely on domestic defense industries, with a decidedly anti-labor, anti-administration bent to it.

Two of the pieces today take swipes at Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins's handling of labor strikes, one of which is devoted solely to that end. A third criticizes inept administration by FDR, citing as example Harold Ickes's policy of exhorting the public to cut down on consumption of electricity, as the Rural Electrification Administrator seeks to expand rural electrification, handing out large sums to build the infrastructure necessary for it. While the column had ample criticism for the Administration during Cash's years, it was always counter-balanced by expression of positive views as well.

But a week of time is too short a period by which to judge. So we shall see as time goes by.

Installment 5 of Out of the Night is here. Superman is gone again, now in his stead appearing Dancing Dottie and her Vitamin-B deficiency, for which Fleischmann's yeast in a little tomato juice does the trick.

We prefer to think of Robert Kennedy in life walking through coal mining towns in West Virginia, speaking with economically depressed mine workers, visiting the families of the poor in Appalachia, or meeting with the farm workers in the central valley of California, offering reinvigorated hope of change in a country beset by division, over race, over war, over poverty and crime and what to do to diminish these correlative, socially corrosive indicia of enforced pessimism.

But inevitably this day of June 6, before that long, sad train ride back across the country to Washington, revivifying for an older generation the train ride from Warm Springs to Washington and Hyde Park bearing the President's body in April, 1945, evokes instead the tragedy of lost hope and lost dreams, displaced by a summer of desperation, awash in a fall bordering on the profane.

A few months ago, we had occasion to view a recently produced documentary by a British documentarian exploring the assassination of Senator Kennedy, a documentary which emphasized the question of whether there was more than one shooter in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the fateful night of June 5, 1968.

The documentary interviews Paul Schrade, for instance, assistant to the campaign, wounded along with the Senator in the pantry, and long a believer that there was more than one gun being fired. It examines footage of persons in the Ambassador ballroom that night, focusing on three particular individuals, who are then identified by former CIA personnel as being CIA employees in the late fifties and early sixties, one in particular, an individual named "Morales", being said to have borne a lasting grudge against President Kennedy and the Attorney General for not supplying air cover to the Bay of Pigs operation, supposedly foredooming its failure in April, 1961. Morales is quoted by an old acquaintance as having confided that he had been in Dallas when he and his cabal of similarly disgruntled krisers shot the President, and in Los Angeles when they shot the Senator.

We found this documentary compelling for a time, seeming almost conclusively to establish that former CIA employees, bearing an elephantine grudge against Robert Kennedy, were inexplicably at the Ambassador on the night of the shooting.

But no sooner than this film thusly gains the viewer's confidence as something possessed of credit and worth the time to examine, it proceeds to blow itself and its entire premise out of the water.

It reveals that the two men who were previously identified by CIA acquaintances as "Campbell" and "Joannides", former CIA employees, were in fact instead two now-deceased Bulova Watch Company employees, at the Ambassador for a company convention which happened to coincide with the locale of the Kennedy primary victory celebration. Whereas early in the documentary they are shown appearing sinister, "Campbell" in particular shown reaching furtively inside his coat for what may be a gun, as he nervously surveils the ballroom with a coup d'œil while appearing to walk away from the pantry area after the shooting, they are subsequently revealed in other footage, taken prior to the shooting, in various innocuous situations, laughing, talking with others, casually mulling about sipping drinks. Moreover, in television news footage taken after the shooting, they are shown looking appropriately concerned, listening to witnesses, unabashedly wandering before visible television cameras, generally looking as non-plussed as any of the other ballroom visitors, certainly not in any hurry to depart the hotel.

Moreover, the impressively positive identifications by former CIA operatives and acquaintances over time of the disgruntled "Morales" as being a man in the ballroom footage, a man also subsequently shown unconcernedly appearing several times in front of television cameras after the shooting, including once during an interview of a witness in the kitchen pantry itself, were also called into question by the revelation of clearer photographs than the grainy, early-sixties photo used through most of the documentary for acquaintance comparison to the man in the film footage. The latter earlier photograph indeed greatly resembled the man filmed in the Ambassador ballroom; but the clearer later photos of Morales, taken in 1967 and 1969, showed a man who scarcely at all bears similitude to the man at the Ambassador.

Even the filmmaker himself expresses doubt in the end that "Morales" as identified by certain acquaintances in the film footage at the Ambassador and the man independently positively identified as Morales in the 1967 and 1969 clear photos are the same man; and that despite the earlier confident identifications to the filmmaker by former friends of Morales that the man at the Ambassador was definitely him.

Nevertheless, the documentary proceeds, without substantiation, to indicate that the Bulova Watch Company was a "well-known cover" for the CIA, according to "several people" to whom the documentarian talked off-camera. It then attempts to confirm that link with the bare facts that World War II General Omar Bradley chaired Bulova at the time, from 1958 to 1973, and also advised President Johnson on Vietnam; nowhere, however, is Bradley linked with the CIA. While Bulova did make bomb fuses for the government during the Cold War, there is no documented historical link with the CIA. (We note, however, a strange coincidence in something we noticed ourselves in the last year, before viewing this documentary: an ad for Bulova in Life, the last issue released before November 22, 1963, showed a large group of Formula One racecar drivers holding up their Bulova wristwatches--which becomes a little strange when one realizes that Oswald was assigned to duty as a Marine radar operator in Japan when the first U-2's flew test missions, U-2's at the time code-named "Racecar".)

Regardless, the documentary concludes rhetorically asking whether the two employees--named by their Bulova employee names in the documentary, based on their being labeled thusly on the back of Los Angeles Police Department evidence photos demonstrating their having been investigated and interviewed briefly by the police at the time of the assassination--could have been using other names, "Campbell" and "Joannides", in their supposed CIA roles, using the supposedly CIA-connected Bulova jobs as cover.

The documentary also reveals, however, that the man identified as CIA operative "Campbell", under his real name as stated on the LAPD police photos, advanced to become a "well-respected" man at Bulova and in the watch industry generally by the late 1970's, and that his role at Bulova was limited to sales.

In the end, this strangely circuitous film debunks itself, serving more to confuse than clarify. If it does anything, it tends more to confirm that the fatal shots were fired solely by Sirhan. Whether Sirhan, however, was "handled", brainwashed, manipulated or hypnotized as a sort of Manchurian candidate, a long promulgated theory explored by Sirhan's own original defense team, is extensively explored by the documentary, including an interview with Sirhan's brother, though providing no more than speculative, if intriguing, answers to that part of its inquiry.

While Robert Kennedy, ironically, had spent the night before the shooting at the home of film director John Frankenheimer, director of both "Seven Days in May" and "The Manchurian Candidate", the key to whatever mystery remains locked away surrounding his death may reside only with the one man who without question took a gun into that pantry and began firing at the Senator shortly after he had won the California primary and appeared destined to go to the Chicago convention with a good case for becoming the party nominee instead of the established favorite, Vice-President Humphrey.

Whether in this case there was anything more at work than a lone young gunman, concerned about Senator Kennedy's stance supportive of Israel, and wishing to make a statement on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War between his native Jordan and Israel, we may never know. It is certainly a possibility, but as yet the evidence of anything more than a badly bungled investigation of the scene by the LAPD, some strong-arm tactics by the police against one female witness who claimed to have seen a woman in a polka-dot dress exit the hotel proclaiming, "We just shot Robert Kennedy", and a lot of strong suspicion of the times, the locale, and the aftermath of the election to come, is hard to come by.

All we know is that a great promise of the application of ideals to government was lost, and with it, for many of a generation, a cynicism produced toward political solutions to problems which probably still pervades, directly or indirectly resultant from all three assassinations of the sixties, a great deal of the thinking in this country.

We woke up that morning of June 6 to a familiar voice gently saying, "They've shot Robert Kennedy." Yet, we prefer to think of him visiting those coal miners, those impoverished of Appalachia, those migrant workers of the central valley of California. He is still out there, sleeves rolled up, shaking hands in spirit, inspiring others.

It may have been a long time gone--but perhaps tomorrow is not such a long time anymore.

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