[mr.james.armstrong]

Dear Dr. Thomas E. Woods Jr,

I direct these remarks to you as you were the lecturer for the JFK lesson.

Maybe it’s unfair but I use the JFK assassination as a litmus test for reliability. There’s the “lone-gunman-magic-bullet-nothing-to-see-here” crowd which includes such stalwarts of intellectual integrity as Brian Williams. There’s also the “CIA-MIC-bloody-coup-last-regime-change-in-50-years” school of thought which includes just about everybody I trust and respect.

Just about.

The awkward exception being, apparently, the illustrious Dr. Thomas E. Woods Jr.

And I say “illustrious” without irony.

I’d like this to be seen more as more of a grumbling than an accusation, but I did sign up for “real history” and departures from court history are the essence of the thing. Not for its own sake, of course, but where conformity to the facts requires it.

Now I understand that this is not an “allowable opinion” but I would think that a drive to “tell it like it was” would, at the very least, produce a statement – entirely factual – that there were a number of people who were of the opinion that the JFK assassination was what it appeared to be and have researched and published along those lines since it happened. Otherwise, I think there is a risk that the reader could be left with an impression that they were living under a regime very different than the one reality obliges them to cope with.

Yes, I realize that “The customer is not always right” is something of a motto around here but the historians, at least, should be – to the extent they can.

And since the implications here are enormous, I’m willing to dedicate a truly vast amount of your time to get to the bottom of it.

Respectfully,
JDA

In honor of the anniversary and to nudge this a bit closer to the thread topic
I recommend Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets.