I recently promised Max Good that I would try to say what I think I am up to in this quest. I have set for myself three personal commandments. Criteria I can expect of myself and everyone on the planet.
. Love myself
. Love my neighbor
. Seek truth
This quest for the answer to the President’s assassination falls under the third mandate. We do not know the truth on this one.
Unfortunately the quest for truth does not “set us free “ rather it creates an obligation to keep looking for truth.
And, it is hard work. I thought I would be writing about “A Woman I know “, by Mary Haverstick, a documentary film maker, she thought she was chronicling the life of a female aviation pioneer, Mercury program trainee, Jerrie Cobb, only to be shocked when after two years of preparation of the film she was warned off by an intelligence operative who had snuck into her acquaintance and abused it to snoop in her study then tell her all these materials were classified and her project would run into “obstacles “.
This led our intrepid documentarian to ask what was Jerrie Cobb’s connection to intelligence?
The answer is this book.
(I have just this moment read Peter Voskamp’s summary over in the JFK Facts Substack whose principal author is Jefferson Morley. I recommend it as an almost comprehensive summary.)
I like the book. But, it’s very very complicated and before I say anything more I believe I should keep thinking and analyzing. I’m on my third reading and I have begun to teach myself how to find documents in the National Archives related to the assassination.
Given that about fifty years ago I was training to be a historian specializing in Medieval European History and could get excited about Florentine tax rolls in the countryside (the Contado) and a random mention of a sharecropper who worked some land owned by the Machiavelli family, diving into these documents is fun for me. Of course the Archivio do Stato di Firenze is in some very nice surroundings but then so is Pocasset.
Maybe for you as well. Perhaps you too would like to see what researchers are analyzing.
Here are a few the key CIA memos planning the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960.
Can you find William Harvey?
Who is QJWIN?
Is it significant that Jerrie Cobb, the pilot, delivered a plane full of surveillance gear to neighboring Tanganyika in May of 1960?
What’s the plan? Some thoughts next week.
If you would like to sample the assassination archives, here is the link
The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection | National Archives
And here is a screenshot to show what that page for the National Archives looks like.
Next week Who was June Cobb? 2 Maybe I will be able to get a little bit further into this. Voskamp in his review cited above calls it a labyrinth…. with justice.
Postscript :
This is the book I’ve been reading . This book states that Jerrie Cobb was also a CIA agent one of whose aliases was June Cobb, an identity she/they had assumed from a real person. It states a lot more than that, which is what I am mulling over. (June Cobb played some very interesting roles in the background of the assassination story.)
Heads up. This book is breaking news in JFK world.
For background on Jerrie Cobb. I have ordered this one
Better tackle this one too.
And then there’s this one.
Final note: I’ve decided to open comments.