Irving house that hosted Lee Harvey Oswald is headed back to 1963

by AVI SELK / Dallas Morning News

Despite half a century of renovations, a boxy little tract house on West Fifth Street has never been able to leave its past behind.

New owners have come and gone: changed the windows, painted the bricks, built new walls. But the tourists who still gawk daily from the sidewalk will always see Ruth Paine’s house on Nov. 22, 1963 — the morning her houseguest fetched his rifle from the garage and headed into Dallas, where the president would be killed soon after.

So the house’s latest owner is embracing its past: scraping off paint, tearing down walls and replacing the fake hardwood of later eras with kitchen tile like that in Paine’s old family photos.

The city of Irving wants to restore nearly every detail of what is set to become the Paine House Museum next fall, just in time for the 50th anniversary of a suburban mother’s last encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Different angle

“The story of the assassination has been told and told,” said Kevin Kendro, the city archivist heading up the project. “We want to focus on Ruth Paine — this Irving housewife living out here in the suburbs.”

The city hopes visitors will pay to walk on Paine’s restored kitchen floor, past a replica of her old telephone stand, and learn how her kindness to Oswald’s family earned her a footnote in his infamy.

Now in her 80s, living in a Quaker community in California, Paine sounds touched — if a touch puzzled — by the project.

“I’d perhaps heard that people drove by,” she said. “But I wasn’t aware there was that much interest in it.”

Paine traded the little house off Story Road for a bigger one a few years after the assassination — after the swarms of FBI agents and newsmen had stopped knocking, but long before the tourists began to trickle past.

“Nobody comes by the other house, do they?” she chuckled. “I think I’m not the one they’re interested in.”

Meeting Marina

With two small children and separated from her husband, Paine met Marina Oswald at a party several months before the assassination, bonding with the Russian immigrant despite a language barrier.

When Marina’s husband lost his job, Paine offered her and her baby a room while Lee Oswald looked for work in other cities. She was happy for the company.

Oswald would usually visit on the weekends — a polite houseguest, Paine said, though somewhat overbearing toward Marina.

The couple had an argument by phone the week before the assassination, after Marina learned her husband had been using a fake name on his supposed job hunts.

“That was one of the first clues I had that he wasn’t tucked together well,” Paine recalled. When Oswald showed up without warning that Thursday, Paine was surprised: He never visited Marina on weekdays or unannounced. She thought perhaps he was there to apologize.

Now she knows better. The next morning, her guest rose quietly in the spare bedroom, left his wedding ring on the dresser and slipped into the cluttered garage.

There, wrapped in a blanket atop a pile of his family’s belongings, lay the rifle Oswald had kept secret from his host.

Reconstructing

Today, the garage is filled with paint buckets, planks, a dismantled sink, closet doors and other post-Paine renovations the city has been tearing out all year.

Replacing them is the tricky part.

Paine moved out of the house after the assassination to pursue a career in education — setting up one of Irving’s first integrated schools before leaving Texas. The only artifacts she’s kept from her old house are a set of hi-fi speakers and a lamp she’s still trying to find for the city.

So Kendro is trying to re-create the Paine House from a smattering of family photos, magazine articles, government reports, and Paine’s imperfect memories.

The archivist is being as meticulous as he can.

City maintenance workers carefully reconstructed a two-foot section of Paine’s knotted-pine cabinet that had been cut away to accommodate a dishwasher.

Crews used Paine’s recollections and faded outlines in the paint to reconstruct her telephone stand. They turned a non-historic third bedroom back into Paine’s dining room and rebuilt the picture window that once looked over the Oswalds’ double bed and baby crib.

But other details are lost to history. Paine simply can’t remember what her kitchen countertop looked like. And while Kendro managed to find an exact copy of her garage door, he couldn’t do the same for her screen.

For all these limits, Kendro has made only one concession to modernity: Visitors to Paine’s old house will enjoy the air conditioning she and the Oswalds had lacked.

Satisfying curiosity

Besides $175,000 to buy the house three years ago, Irving has so far spent about $30,000 restoring it. Officials say the city has up to $100,000 to finish the job: decorate the interior, build a visitors center and hire a company to construct exhibits.

The museum will sit in the middle of a residential neighborhood, its authentic 1960s driveway barely able to accommodate an SUV. So Kendro plans to bus tour groups in from an off-site visitors center.

That’s a relief to neighbors on the car-lined street, whose chief thoughts about the project centered on its traffic impact.

Kendro doesn’t know if the museum will be popular, or how many who snap pictures from the sidewalk will pay to step inside.

Paine has no plans to be among them, unless the city needs her to help promote the museum.

“Let the people who are interested go look,” she said.

The archivist takes a more holistic view.

“Ruth just sees it as a place he stayed; it doesn’t have any effect on the big story,” said Kendro. “And she’s correct in that regard. But, you know, humans are curious.

“It’s just another aspect to this humongous historic event,” he said. “And it sent a ripple into this one little life, changing it forever.”

Source: Dallas Morning News

Dallas apartment complex where Lee Harvey Oswald briefly lived being demolished

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DALLAS — A dilapidated Dallas apartment complex where Lee Harvey Oswald briefly lived before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is being demolished.

After a four-year battle over code violations at the uninhabited 10-unit, two-story apartment complex built in 1925, owner Jane Bryant is in the process of taking the building down per a court order. She’s been salvaging building materials and selling off items from Oswald’s three-room apartment. The toilet already has a new owner.

Bryant was never able to realize her plans to renovate the building in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas after buying it in 2007, and the next year got caught up in litigation with the city over the state of the building at 600 Elsbeth St.

“We’re not just losing a piece of fundamental history to Dallas related to the assassination, we’re also losing a piece of fundamental architecture to this area,” said Bryant, who concedes that at this point she has no choice but to tear the building down, adding, “There comes a time when you just have to cut your losses.”

The apartment, where Oswald lived from November 1962 to March 1963 with his wife, Marina, and young daughter, is mentioned in the Warren Commission report, which investigated the president’s death. The report concluded that Oswald acted alone on Nov. 22, 1963, when he fired at Kennedy’s motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository as it passed by Dealey Plaza.

Oswald then killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit 45 minutes after Kennedy was shot, according to the report.

Oswald was arrested in the hours after the assassination, but was killed two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

The apartment where Oswald lived had the address of 604 Elsbeth St. in 1963. It was apartment No. 2. The residence was one of several in the area where he lived after returning to the U.S. from Russia in June 1962.

“He can’t hold a job for very long. He’s moving around quite a bit, can’t get settled, breaks off relations with his brother and mother soon after coming back. He goes from Fort Worth to Dallas to New Orleans, back to Dallas, basically,” said Max Holland, author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes.

David Preziosi, executive director of Preservation Dallas, noted that there are more important buildings associated with Oswald than the Elsbeth Street apartment, including the boarding house where he was staying the day of the assassination and the Texas Theatre, where Oswald was arrested.

After leaving the Elsbeth Street apartment, Oswald moved a few blocks away, to Neely Street — where the famous pictures were taken of him posing in the backyard holding the rifle used in the assassination. He was living at a boarding house in the same area but on Beckley Avenue when Kennedy was assassinated.

Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, said Oswald ordered the revolver that killed Tippit in January, when he was living at the Elsbeth apartment, but notes that “the most important parts of the Oswald story are what he did, not where he did them.”

“One has to draw the line somewhere at what is or is not historically significant. For those studying Oswald’s life, this may be a more important address, but for those who are curious about the Kennedy assassination, what actually happened in Dealey Plaza is of far more significance,” Mack said.

Bryant didn’t know of the site’s link to history until the year after she bought it. After a local television station did a piece the building she had dreams of renovating, people got in contact to let her know of the Oswald connection.

She notes that the building has been a point of interest, adding that she’d had tourists from overseas come by the complex on Thanksgiving.

Bryant faced a court-ordered deadline to have the building completely demolished by Friday, which she was unlikely to meet. Per the court order, the city has the right to demolish it and place a lien on the property for the cost of demolition if the deadline is not met, but the city did not immediately say Friday when they might make that move.

Source: The Washington Post / The Associated Press

Somber 50th anniversary of JFK assassination to include Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough

by JONATHAN RIENSTRA / Austin Culturemap

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, Ruth Altshuler and former mayor Ron Kirk announced plans Tuesday at the Old Red Museum in Dallas for next year’s 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death.

Headed by a 25-person committee, “The 50th” is a public memorial that will take place at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 2013, beginning at 12:25 pm.

“It was important the direction of this event was generated by the citizens of Dallas,” Rawlings said. “Not by one person, and not by any one group and not even City Hall. That’s why for the creation of the 50th committee, members were selected that were symbolizing the whole community.”

The event will be free and open to the public, Altshuler said, though the committee is currently figuring out a ticketing system for those wishing to attend.

Private donors have and will fund the 50th, ensuring that the city will not absorb any of the costs. Altshuler said that they have already raised more than $1 million and hope to reach at least $2 million.

Altshuler also said that noted historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough will be the guest speaker, mostly touching on quotes from some of John F. Kennedy’s speeches. Bells across the city will mark the beginning of the ceremony.

Mayor Rawlings said that he hopes the entire city will observe a moment of silence at 12:30 pm and plans to ask mayors around the country if their cities will follow suit.

“The death of President Kennedy lives with us in the year 2012,” Rawlings said. “It was an event that altered the lives of anyone that was old enough to remember the tragic events of November 22, 1963. His death forever marked our city, but his life changed the world.”

Rawlings and Kirk expect the rest of the country and the world to be looking at Dallas this time next year. Rawlings said they hope to honor the life, legacy and leadership of JFK and to mark the day with a sense of dignity and honor.

“The 50th will be a serious, respectful and understated public memorial,” Rawlings said.

Former mayor and current US Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk said that in his travels around the world, he has found that Dallas is closely associated with JFK’s death.

“This story is going to be told,” he said. “It’s so much more important that it be told by Dallas, because I don’t think any community was forced into the level of retrospection that Dallas was.”

Mayor Rawlings believes the 50th will explore how that day defined the growth and development of Dallas moving forward. He spoke of how it can be difficult to reconcile the past with the present and the future.

“When John F. Kennedy launched his presidency,” Rawlings said, “he told Americans, ‘We stand today on the edge of a new frontier, of unknown opportunities and paths.’ That is why we will honor the life and legacy of President John F. Kennedy, and in doing so, we honor the spirit by heading forward in this new frontier.”

Source: Austin Culturemap

Historical marker for slain police officer J.D. Tippit unveiled in Oak Cliff ceremony

by ROY APPLETON / Dallas Morning News

Dallas police Chief David Brown, left, and Farris Rookstool III help Marie Tippit unveil a historical marker honoring her late husband, J.D. Tippit (Brad Loper / Dallas Morning News)  

President Kennedy had been shot in downtown Dallas. A police dispatcher ordered Officer J.D. Tippit into central Oak Cliff and minutes later told him to be “at large for any emergency that comes in.” 

Police broadcasts described the shooting suspect as a “white male, approximately 30, slender build, height 5 foot 10 inches, weight 165 pounds.” 

At about 1:15 p.m. a cruising Tippit stopped a man walking on a sidewalk along Patton Avenue near 10th Street. Within seconds, four gunshots erupt. 

This afternoon, almost 49 years later, a crowd gathered at that crossing to honor the officer, slain outside his squad car that tragic day in Dallas. 

“On November 22, 1963, at this intersection, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald, 45 minutes after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza.”

So begins the inscription on a state historical marker unveiled today at a corner of the Adamson High School campus, an area with little resemblance to the residential neighborhood there in 1963.

“Although the intersection of 10th and Patton Streets has changed,” the marker inscription concludes, “Officer Tippit’s actions and subsequent murder at this site are remembered for setting into motion a series of events that led directly to Oswald’s arrest.”

An 11-year veteran of the police force, Tippit received posthumous honors and praise for heroism – for doing his job, sending the gunman, later identified by witnesses as Oswald, the suspected presidential assassin, toward his capture at the Texas Theatre six blocks away.

A touched nation donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the 39-year-old officer’s family. But the site of his slaying had never been publicly designated for history’s sake.

Brad Watson, a reporter for WFAA-TV, Channel 8, questioned the lack of recognition for Tippit in a broadcast two years ago. Michael Amonett, then president of the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League, took up the cause, with help from Farris Rookstool III, a Kennedy assassination historian.

The school district provided the land. And the Texas Historical Foundation donated $5,000 to the project.

The crowd of about 200 people Tuesday included Tippit’s widow Marie; his children, Allan, Brenda and Curtis Tippit; his sister Joyce DeBord; other family members; and police officers past and present.

Standing and sitting under a cloudless sky, they watched members of the Adamson ROTC present the colors, heard the Dallas police choir sing "God Bless America" and listened while speakers praised the slain officer and his family.

“Officer Tippit did what hundreds of Dallas police officers do and have done every day since this tragedy,” said Dallas school trustee Eric Cowan. “He did his job, and as a result he gave the ultimate sacrifice and we as a community should — now thanks to this marker – never forget what happened on that day.”

Said Amonett: Forty-nine years ago “no one’s life was more impacted than the two families that lost their loved ones that day. … We have spent a lot of time honoring one of those families and that is right because he was our president. But we have also neglected one of those families.

“We honor Officer Tippit here today to try in a small way to right that. This has been a long time coming. I hope this is a way to say we are grateful for your sacrifice and that we are sorry for your loss.”

Dallas police Chief David Brown told those gathered that “there is no greater love than this: That a man would lay down his life for his fellow man.”

And after recounting details of the Tippit shooting and Oswald’s arrest, he said, “May God’s grace continue to bless and heal this family.”

Before the ceremony, Marie Tippit said, “It’s such an honor what they are doing for J.D. I appreciate it so much.”

Curtis and Brenda Tippit said they were thankful for the public support and recognition of their father. “It validates his service,” Curtis said. And the marker “should remind people of what police officers go through every day.”

In her brief remarks, Mrs. Tippit noted her husband “died just a few steps from here, doing his job, enforcing the law.”

And then with the help of Brown and Rookstool, she unveiled the marker, smiling as the crowd applauded.

Source: The Dallas Morning News

Gaeton Fonzi, Investigator of JFK Assassination, Dies at 76

by PAUL VITELLO / New York Times
 

Gaeton Fonzi was one of the most relentless investigators on the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, remembered by former colleagues with both awe and echoes of the impatience he inspired with his pursuit of the full story behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

They called him Ahab.

Mr. Fonzi was also the staff member most publicly dismayed by the committee’s final report, which concluded in 1979 that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

Of course it was a conspiracy, said Mr. Fonzi, a journalist recruited mainly on the strength of scathing magazine critiques he had written about the Warren Commission and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing the president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But who were the conspirators? What was their motive? How could the committee close its doors without the answers?

Mr. Fonzi, who died in Florida on Aug. 30 at 76, nailed those questions to the committee’s locked doors, figuratively, in a long article he wrote the next year for Washingtonian magazine and in a 1993 book, “The Last Investigation.” In both, he chronicled the near-blanket refusal of government intelligence agencies, especially the C.I.A., to provide the committee with documents it requested. And he accused committee leaders of folding under pressure — from Congressional budget hawks, political advisers and the intelligence agencies themselves — just as promising new leads were emerging.

“Is it unrealistic to desire, for something as important as the assassination of a president, an investigation unbound by political, financial or time restrictions?” he asked in Washingtonian.

He never got the answer he had hoped for. Congress never authorized a follow-up to the work of the committee, which, from 1977 to 1979, also re-examined the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., concluding that it, too, “likely” resulted from an unspecified conspiracy.

But historians and researchers consider Mr. Fonzi’s book among the best of the roughly 600 published on the Kennedy assassination, and credit him with raising doubts about the government’s willingness to share everything it knew. The author Jefferson Morley, a former reporter for The Washington Post, said “The Last Investigation” had refocused attention on a handful of reported contacts between C.I.A. operatives and Oswald — tantalizing leads that had long been fascinating to conspiracy buffs but that had never been fully scrutinized by a veteran investigative reporter.

The Central Intelligence Agency has denied that any such contacts occurred, and Mr. Fonzi spent most of his two years with the committee crisscrossing the world trying to prove otherwise. He considered it impossible that the C.I.A. had never made contact with Oswald, a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, repatriated with his Russian wife and baby in 1962, and settled in Dallas, where he openly espoused Communist views.

“We called him Ahab, because he was so single-minded about that white whale,” said G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel and staff director of the House committee, now a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. The white whale for Mr. Fonzi was the meaning of those supposed contacts.

Mr. Blakey was criticized by Mr. Fonzi as overly deferential to the C.I.A., and he now concedes that Mr. Fonzi was probably right on that score. Mr. Blakey said he was shocked in 2003 when declassified C.I.A. documents revealed the full identity of the retired agent who had acted as the committee’s liaison to the C.I.A. The agency never told Mr. Blakey that the agent, George Joannides, had overseen a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Dallas in the months before the assassination, when Oswald had two well-publicized clashes with them.

At the time of the revelation, the C.I.A. said Mr. Joannides had withheld nothing relevant from the committee. Mr. Joannides died in 1990.

“Mr. Joannides obstructed our investigation,” Mr. Blakey said. Asked how that had affected the committee’s work, he added: “We’ll never know. But I can say that for a guy like Gaeton, a guy who really wanted to know what happened to Kennedy, it kind of tortured him.”

Gaetano Fonzi was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 10, 1935, to Leonora and Gaetano Fonzi, a barber. (He later shortened his first name.) After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he was a reporter and editor at Philadelphia Magazine. In one article, he and a co-author revealed that a former star reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Harry J. Karafin, had extorted money from local businessmen with threats of unflattering coverage.

Mr. Fonzi died of complications of Parkinson’s disease at his home in Manalapan, Fla., his wife, Marie, said. He is also survived by four children, Irene, Guy and Christopher Fonzi and Maria Fonzi-Gonzalez; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

In Florida, Mr. Fonzi worked for Miami and Gold Coast magazines, writing investigative articles. He also wrote several other books, including a biography of the media mogul and philanthropist Walter Annenberg. But the Kennedy assassination remained the story that consumed him.

“He thought the murder of President Kennedy was a turning point in history,” his wife said. “He said it was the point when the American people stopped trusting their government.”

Source: New York Times

Murray J. Jackson, former Dallas police dispatcher dies at 77

by DALE K. MYERS

The former Dallas police radio dispatcher who handled the police emergency in the wake of the Kennedy assassination has died at the age of 77 in Hamilton, Texas.

Murray James Jackson was a warm a fun-loving soul who will be remembered by friends and family for his great sense of humor and helpful attitude.

He was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, on September 24, 1934 to Murray Bernard and Lura Fern Jackson. In 1943, they moved to Dallas, Texas, where Murray spent most of his childhood. He attended Sunset High School and in 1952 as a senior got a part-time job working at a Mobil service station at Hampton and Fort Worth Avenue. It was there that he met many Dallas police officers who would occasionally come in, use the restroom, drink a Coke, and take a break.

One of those officers was J.D. Tippit, whom Jackson grew to admire. “I wanted to be just like him,” Jackson once said. “He impressed me quite a bit.”

In 1957, Jackson was drafted into the U.S. Army but was released a year later on a hardship discharge. It was then that he decided to pursue his dream of becoming a Dallas police officer.

He graduated from the police academy in June of 1958. After working late nights and evenings for nearly three years he was partnered with the man who inspired him – J.D. Tippit. They worked together until early 1963 when Murray took a position in the department as a radio dispatcher.

On November 22, 1963, Jackson sent his former partner and personal friend into the central Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Thirty minutes later, Tippit was shot to death at Tenth and Patton after stopping Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a tough blow for Jackson who never really came to terms with the loss.

Jackson retired from the police department in November, 1994, and moved to Hamilton, Texas, with his wife Mary Jo to be close to her mother and father. They opened an antique store just off the town square which they operated for many years.

Those who knew Murray knew him as a gentle man who forever enjoyed telling jokes and making people laugh. He had an intense love and commitment to his family and was a devoted husband to Mary, and a loving and caring father to Mary’s children.

He was also open to discussing one of the most intense and tragic moments of his life, the assassination of President Kennedy and murder of his friend and fellow officer, J.D. Tippit.

I had the good fortune to sit and talk with Murray for many hours in 1985 and 1999, and found him candid, funny, serious, and knowledgeable. On more than one occasion, he went out of his way to help answer questions and unravel some of the mysteries and confusion that followed in the aftermath of the assassination. For that, we are forever grateful.

Murray Jackson died on March 16, 2012, in Hamilton, Texas, at the age of 77.

He is survived by his wife Mary Jo; daughter, Melinda Jo Cohen of Hamilton; son Richard Eddie Blackmon of Hamilton; three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

He will be missed. [END]

National Archives to Keep JFK Secrets until 2017

The National Archives (NARA) today turned down the request of a Washington non-profit public interest group to declassify secret records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in time for the 50th anniversary of that tragic event in 2013.

The request for release of the secret documents was made by the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), a Washington, D.C. non-profit public interest group in a letter signed by several of its board members and attorneys Mark Zaid, Charles Sanders and Prof G Robert Blakey, who served as the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

The letter made the point that the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2013 will result in widespread discussion and news coverage, and that government documents related to the assassination should be made public in order for a fully informed discussion.

Here is the complete text of the response from the National Archives in a letter from NARA General Counsel Gary M. Stern to Assassination Archives and Research Center President Jim Lesar:

“I write in response to the letter of January 20, 2012, from you and five colleagues to David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, requesting that the National Archives and Records Administration review the remaining classified documents that were ‘postponed’ from public disclosure in accordance with the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 in time for the 50th anniversary of the assassination in November 2013.

“We share your passion and commitment to providing access to JFK assassination records as quickly as possible. As your letter recounts, the JFK Act established a rigorous process for declassification review and release that was administered by the Assassination Records Review Board until 1998. For any assassination records that were not released by the ARRB, subsequent release could be postponed until a date certain not to exceed 25 years from the enactment of the JFK Act, i.e., no later than 2017.

“The JFK Act Collection consists of a total of approximately 5 million pages, and less than 1% of the documents in the Collection are ‘postponed in full’ until 2017. I note that your letter states that in 2010, Assistant Archivist ‘Michael Kurtz revealed that the CIA continues to withhold approximately 50,000 pages of JFK assassination-related records.’ I would like to clarify that NARA has never counted, and thus does not know, the actual number of pages that are postponed in full. Dr. Kurtz accurately stated that ‘less than one percent’ of the total volume of assassination records was still being withheld; he also provided our rough estimate that the collection totals approximately five million pages. Thus, it appears that the 50,000 page number in your letter may have been derived by incorrectly calculating a full one percent of five million pages. All we do know is that the CIA withheld in full a total of 1,171 documents as national security classified (there is a small number of other agency documents also postponed in full, principally for law enforcement).

“Your letter asks NARA to submit these remaining 1,171 documents ‘currently withheld by the CIA’ for declassification review as part of the National Declassification Center's (NDC) project to complete the declassification of the ‘400 million page backlog’ identified in the President's December 29, 2009, Memorandum Implementing Executive Order 13526, by December 31, 2013. We recognize that, in a 2010 public forum. Dr. Kurtz stated that the postponed JFK assassination records would be included as part of the NDC project. However, as we have tried to explain before. Dr. Kurtz misspoke. Rather, because the postponed JFK assassination records have already been subject to a full and complete government-wide declassification review, they are not part of the 400 million page backlog of records that have yet to receive a final review.

“Because of the mandated December 31, 2013 deadline for our review and processing of the extremely large set of backlogged records, the NDC must target its efforts exclusively on records contained within that backlog. In addition, because we are limited in the resources we can assign to these special reviews, we try to balance historical impact, public interest, and extent of other government agency involvement in order to manage government-wide declassification resource constraints as efficiently and effectively as possible.

“As you know, the JFK Act authorized unprecedented powers for the ARRB, including the ability to overturn an agency decision on declassification, with the President as the only appeal authority. Although agencies did appeal ARRB decisions, President Clinton did not overturn any access determinations on appeal. The power wielded by the ARRB meant that more records were declassified and made available under the JFK Act than would have been released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or any currently applicable review provision of the prior or current Executive Order on Classified National Security Information.

“As previously mentioned, the 1,171 remaining postponed documents will be released in 2017, unless the President personally certifies on a document by document basis that continued postponement is necessary and that the harm from disclosure is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. Moreover, as you point out, the JFK Act clearly intended for periodic releases prior to the 2017 date. To date all of the periodic release dates have been met, including in 2006, when the CIA made preemptory releases of all documents that were postponed from release until 2010. Thus, the only documents in the Collection that are still withheld in full for classification reasons are the 1,171 CIA documents that the ARRB agreed should not be released until 2017.

“We recognize that the remaining records are of high public interest and historical value, and we appreciate your stated desire not to have to wait five more years to obtain access to these records. Given this public interest, we have been consulting with the CIA to see if it would be possible to review and release any of these remaining documents in time for the 50"^ anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination in 2013. Although the CIA shares NARA's interest in wanting to be responsive to your request, they have concluded there are substantial logistical requirements that must take place prior to the release of these remaining records and there is simply not sufficient time or resources to complete these tasks prior to 2017. Accordingly, we will not be able to accommodate your request.

“Thank you for your interest in this matter. Please share this letter with the co-signatories to your letter, and let me know if you have any questions.” [END]

Earl F. Rose of Iowa City, figure in JFK case, dies

by KYLE MUNSON / Des Moines Register
Earl Rose was the medical examiner in Dallas in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed there. This photo was taken in the mid-1960s. [Des Moines Register]

I just received word that retired forensic pathologist and University of Iowa professor Earl Rose of Iowa City, 85, whom I profiled a couple days ago in my column in the Des Moines Sunday Register, died at 3:15 a.m. today. He had received full-time care at Oaknoll retirement community in Iowa City, where his wife, Marilyn, who phoned me, also has lived for nearly three years.

Rose in 2005 was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and then developed dementia. His memory, conversational ability and overall quality of life steadily declined in recent years, and Marilyn said that her husband’s death today in many ways offered a “blessed release” from his suffering.

Marilyn called the timing of my column “uncanny,” and there’s also the matter that Rose has died on the same day Robert Caro publishes the fourth volume of his biography of President Lyndon Johnson, a book that includes an account of the late medical examiner’s actions in Dallas, Texas, in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination. Rose on Nov. 22, 1963, argued (unsuccessfully) that by law Kennedy’s body should remain in Dallas for a complete and thorough autopsy to aid the investigation; history more or less proved that Rose had the correct view.

But there was much more to the man if you read my column or, even better, delve into Rose’s own wonderful writings in the University of Iowa’s archives.

Taking time in recent weeks to talk with Marilyn and to read through her husband’s work that she helped to compile and edit was an experience that reaffirmed the power of words for me. Rose took care in his retirement to set down his thoughts on paper, even as his mind eroded. He was clear, detailed and witty in prose and poetry alike. At times he even directly addressed his own mental decline.

Now those words represent a substantial lasting gift to his family, former medical colleagues, fellow Iowans.

Marilyn said that there will be no funeral, but a memorial service probably will be scheduled in early June in Iowa City to allow time for the couple’s five daughters, scattered across the nation, to convene. (Rose was preceded in death by his son in 2005.)

At one point during our recent conversations, Marilyn said that each daughter might end up reading a different excerpt of Rose’s writings at the eventual memorial service. That seems a fitting tribute.

Source: Des Moines Register

James Sibert: Last surviving FBI agent at JFK autopsy dies

by STEPHANIE BORDEN / Naples Daily News

He was the last surviving FBI agent to attend the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy.

But, as family and friends say, James Sibert was much more than that. A husband, father and decorated World War II veteran, Sibert died April 6 in Fort Myers of complications following a hospital fall.

Sibert was 93, and a memorial service Saturday will remember his life. It starts at 10:30 a.m. and will be at Cypress Lake United Methodist Church, 8570 Cypress Lake Drive, Fort Myers.

"I do believe he will have a place in history," said his son Bob Sibert, a former FBI agent now working as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.

A junior in high school when Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, Bob Sibert said he didn't realize the significance of his father's role in the autopsy at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., until later, "when dad began getting solicited by authors writing books about the assassination."

"There were a lot of people writing wild conspiracy stories," he explained. "He was rather guarded, and referred them to the FBI Press Office. But once he retired and was granted permission to share his observations, he was very concerned that they would not be spun or used to advance some theory he didn't believe to be true."

James Sibert was an Indianapolis native who had lived in the Fort Myers area since his 1972 retirement from the bureau, As a World War II B-24 bomber pilot and Squadron Commander flying 32 missions, he was awarded the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He became an FBI agent and received notoriety because he attended JFK's autopsy.

Observations Sibert made during the autopsy included the his statement in many published interviews that he "didn't buy the single bullet theory," which was key to the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman at Dealey Plaza that fateful day.

"I've heard him say that," Bob Sibert said. "As an FBI agent, you're trained when you go to anything like this to observe and take detailed notes. The agents were not doctors. And at that time, the FBI had no jurisdiction in the assassination of a president. At the end, he was denying interviews. He said 'there's nothing left to say.'"

The second agent observing the autopsy that day was Francis O'Neill, who died in Boston in 2009 at age 85.

A group of his fellow retired FBI agents plans to attend Saturday's memorial service. Sibert was active in the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. Headquartered in Virginia, the local group's territory extends from Port Charlotte to Marco Island and attracts as many as 40 members.

Retired agent Paul Nolan of Fort Myers, who moved his family 29 times during his FBI career, met Sibert during a local meeting in the late 1990s.

"In the FBI world," he reports, "there is more of a family relationship because of the work we do. It's confidential, so you can't share details of your work around the dinner table at home. Even after retirement, agents still regard themselves as agents.

"When one of our members or spouses passed, he had a long written outline of the tasks that needed to be performed," Nolan said of James Sibert. "He'd visit with the families, help prepare insurance forms, visit with bankers and stockbrokers, and ensure that widows were protected" when approached by strangers offering to help with their financial issues.

Although Sibert's name is preserved in the FBI's report "Autopsy of Body of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy" and in countless books, articles, and blogs, he preferred that his legacy be that of a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, his son said.

Soloist Rob Liddle will sing the hymn "My Father's Chair" at Saturday's celebration of life memorial service, remembering how Sibert could be found at every 11 a.m. Sunday service in pew number 6, on the corner.

The retired FBI agent was "a true gentleman, humble, articulate, and always in a suit at church," Liddle says. "He wouldn't really talk about the Kennedy autopsy other than to say he was there."

Even though Sibert had suffered health problems recently, Liddle says, "he never complained. He cared more about what's going on with you than what's going on with him."

The week of his death, four retired veterans lined up in his Hope Hospice room to give him a final salute.

Source: Naples Daily News

The Kennedy assassination: Did Castro know in advance?

A new book by former CIA analyst Brian Latell details evidence that Cuban intelligence knew beforehand of JFK’s assassination

by GLENN GARVIN / Miami Herald

The orders surprised the Cuban intelligence officer. Most days in his tiny communications hut, just outside Fidel Castro’s isolated family compound on the west side of Havana, were spent huddled over his radio gear, trolling the island’s airwaves for the rapid-fire bursts of signals that were the trademark of CIA spies and saboteurs, pinpointing their location for security forces.

But now his assignment had abruptly been changed, at least for the day. “The leadership wants you to stop your CIA work, all your CIA work,” his boss said. Instead, the officer was told he had a new target: Texas, “any little detail small detail from Texas.” And about three hours later, shortly after mid-day on Nov. 22, 1963, the shocked intelligence officer had something to report that was much more than a small detail: the assassination in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy.

“Castro knew,” the intelligence officer would tell a CIA debriefer years later, after defecting to the United States. “They knew Kennedy would be killed.”

The defector’s tale is reported in a book to be published next month by retired CIA analyst Brian Latell, the agency’s former national intelligence officer for Latin America and now a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies.

The book, Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, is the first substantial study of Fidel Castro’s intelligence operations. Based on interviews with Cuban spies who defected as well as declassified documents from the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and other national security organs, it contains a good deal of material likely to stir controversy, including accounts of how Castro’s spies have carried out political murders, penetrated the U.S. government and generally outwitted their American counterparts.

But nothing is more potentially explosive than Latell’s claim that Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, warned Cuban intelligence officers in advance of his plans to kill the president. Latell writes that Oswald, a belligerent Castro supporter, grew frustrated when officials at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City refused to give him a visa to travel to the island, and promised to shoot Kennedy to prove his revolutionary credentials.

“Fidel knew of Oswald’s intentions — and did nothing to deter the act,” the book declares.

Even so, Latell maintains his work is sober and even reserved. “Everything I write is backed up by documents and on-the-record sources,” he told The Miami Herald. “There’s virtually no speculation. I don’t say Fidel Castro ordered the assassination, I don’t say Oswald was under his control. He might have been, but I don’t argue that, because I was unable to find any evidence for that.

“But did Fidel want Kennedy dead? Yes. He feared Kennedy. And he knew Kennedy was gunning for him. In Fidel’s mind, he was probably acting in self-defense.”

If Latell’s prose is sober, the events it describes are anything but. Castro’s Secrets, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, explores a confusing and deadly chapter of the 1960s when the Cold War nearly turned hot. The United States, fearful that Castro’s revolution would provide the Soviet Union a toehold in the Western Hemisphere, backed a bloody invasion of anti-communist Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba, which left the entire world teetering on the brink of war for two weeks.

And even when everyone took a step back, U.S.-supported raids and sabotage continued in Cuba. The CIA hatched several plots to kill Castro, using everything from poisoned cigars to exploding sea shells, and Castro offered chilling hints that he might be planning to respond in kind. “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe,” he told an American reporter in September 1963.

Against that backdrop, suspicions of a Cuban connection to the Kennedy assassination were only natural. And they were heightened by the erratic activities of Oswald, a lifelong Marxist who left the Marine Corps in 1959 to defect to the Soviet Union, where he attempted to renounce his U.S. citizenship and married a Russian woman whose uncle was a colonel in military intelligence.

By 1963, Oswald had returned to the United States. But just a few months before Kennedy’s death, at a time when tensions between Havana and Washington simmered only slightly below war temperature, Oswald’s outspoken public support for Cuba — he had staged several one-man demonstrations and even scuffled with members of an anti-Castro group — had come to the attention of the news media in New Orleans, where he was living at the time.

And he had also attracted the attention of the CIA, which had the Mexico City embassies of Cuba and the Soviet Union under tight surveillance. The agency spotted Oswald at both embassies on multiple visits between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, 1963, as he sought visas to travel to either country.

Those visits — particularly to the Cuban embassy, where Oswald took a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and other documents to demonstrate his support for Castro’s revolution in hopes of winning a visa — were among evidence considered by three major federal investigations of the Kennedy assassination in the 1960s and ’70s. All ultimately rejected (though sometimes only after fierce internal debate) the idea of any causal link between Castro and the crime.

But Latell’s book makes some new revelations and adds detail to older ones in making the argument that Castro played at least an indirect role in the assassination. Among them:

• The disclosure by Florentino Aspillaga, the most valuable defector ever to flee Cuba’s DGI intelligence service, that the DGI had asked him to drop radio surveillance of the CIA hours before the assassination to focus on signals from Texas. Aspillaga told his CIA debriefers about the change in surveillance when he defected in 1987, but that information remained secret until he repeated the story to Latell in interviews for the book.

• The report of a deeply embedded FBI spy who worked as top-level international courier for the Communist Party USA that Castro, during a meeting five months after the assassination, admitted that Oswald had threatened Kennedy’s life during his visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico.

The spy, Jack Childs, who was awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for his quarter-century of spying against Moscow and Havana, reported to the FBI that Castro told him Oswald “stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him headed out saying, “I’m going to kill Kennedy for this!”

• The CIA’s now-declassified report of its 1964 debriefing of another DGI defector, Vladimir Rodriguez Ladera. At the time, Castro was claiming that Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico had been a minor matter that didn’t come to the attention of senior officials in Havana. “We never in our life heard of him,” Castro said in a speech strongly denying that the Cuban government knew anything about Oswald beyond what was in the newspapers.

But Rodriguez Ladera, the defector, told the CIA that Castro was surely lying, because the news of Oswald’s arrest set DGI headquarters instantly abuzz. “It caused much comment concerning the fact that Oswald had been in the Cuban embassy,” he said. And because the embassy in Mexico City was a major staging ground for Cuban espionage against the United States as well as the rest of Latin America, Rodriguez Ladera added, even the most routine matters there were regularly reported directly to Castro.

• CIA wiretaps and microphones honeycombing the Cuban embassy in Mexico City captured conversations between DGI officers that showed a surprisingly detailed knowledge of Oswald’s background in the first hours after the assassination, when relatively little of it had been reported in the press.

At the center of the chatter was Luisa Calderon, a pretty, English-speaking DGI officer in her early 20s who had lived in Miami with her parents throughout the 1950s. Barely four hours after the assassination, she got a phone call from a man, also apparently a DGI spy. He asked if she knew what had happened in Dallas. “Yes, of course,” she answered. “I knew of it almost before Kennedy did.” Her caller continued to chatter away, noting correctly that Oswald spoke Russian and had written to Castro offering to join his fighting forces in 1959. Latell believes the speed and depth of those comments show that the DGI maintained a file on Oswald and was well acquainted with him.

The wiretaps also demonstrate something about the way Cuban intelligence officers regarded Kennedy. “Wonderful! What good news!” Calderon said to another caller who mentioned the assassination, before breaking into laughter at the news — untrue, as it would turn out — that Kennedy’s wife and brother had also been wounded. “He was a family man, yes, but also a degenerate aggressor,” Calderon added, to which her caller exclaimed, “Three shots in the face!” Replied Calderon: “Perfect!”

• In what may be the most intriguing element of his book, Latell concludes that Rolando Cubela, a high-ranking Cuban official recruited by the CIA to assassinate Castro — an act the agency hoped would trigger a military rebellion — was actually a double agent, feeding every detail of U.S. plans back to Havana. Castro’s knowledge that his own murder was being plotted by the highest level of the American government, Latell writes, is what led to his “conspiracy of silence” about Oswald’s assassination plan.

“Fidel Castro was running the most important double agent operation in the history of intelligence,” Latell said. “He wanted definitive proof that Kennedy was trying to kill him. And he got it.” In a brutal irony, the CIA was delivering to Cubela a poison-tipped ballpoint pen with which to kill Castro at the very moment that Oswald was shooting Kennedy.

Two major pieces of evidence implicate Cubela as a double agent, Latell writes. One was a recently declassified lie-detector test administered to Cubela’s best friend and frequent co-conspirator in CIA adventures, the late Coral Gables jeweler Carlos Tepedino. Tepedino, during a confrontational interrogation by CIA handlers in 1965, confessed that Cubela was still “cooperating’’ with Cuban intelligence and had never tried to organize a military revolt against Castro.

Tepedino’s story was more than confirmed, Latell writes, by conversations with another DGI defector: Miguel Mir, a high official in Castro’s personal security office from 1986 to 1992. Mir said he had read files identifying Cubela as a double agent under DGI control.

Mercurial and enigmatic, Cubela was one of the military heroes of the Cuban revolution, the man who actually captured the presidential palace in Havana. But soon afterward he began talking loosely about his dissatisfaction with Castro’s political direction. By 1961 he was meeting clandestinely with the CIA; by 1962 he was a trusted recruit, regarded by the CIA as its best agent inside Castro’s government.

But, Latell writes, Cubela’s recruitment by the CIA practically dripped with question marks right from the beginning. He seemed to have unlimited time and money to travel, meeting with CIA officers on four different continents. He refused to take a lie-detector test — a standard procedure for new recruits — or report any significant information about what was going on inside Castro’s government. Instead, he constantly proposed “violent action,” as one of his CIA handlers noted in a report, including the assassination of Castro.

That did not exactly clash with the CIA’s own plans. By early 1963, the agency was under serious pressure from the Kennedy administration to “come up with some ideas to kill Castro,” as one CIA official would later testify in a congressional hearing. In October, the agency began circulating a document to the top national security officials in Washington stamped TOP SECRET-SENSITIVE with the title A Contingency Plan for a Coup in Cuba. It said Cubela and his military co-conspirators would “neutralize” Castro and “the top echelon of the Cuban leadership,” then proclaim a new pro-American government that would — if necessary — ask for U.S. military assistance to put down any resistance. “Nothing in the plan allowed for Fidel’s capture alive,” Latell writes.

When Cubela heard of the plan and his role in it, he was enthusiastic. But he insisted on a meeting with Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother and point-man on Cuba, for assurances that the plan had presidential blessing. Desmond FitzGerald, a top CIA official and close friend of Robert Kennedy, flew to Paris to meet Cubela and reassure him. The CIA also got President Kennedy to insert a chunk of extraordinarily militant rhetoric — a virtual endorsement of a military coup — into a speech on Cuba delivered in Miami Beach just four days before the president’s death.

The CIA called off its plan for the Cuban coup after Kennedy’s assassination, and new President Lyndon Johnson rapidly de-escalated the covert U.S. war against Castro — though Cubela, for another two years, continued pressing both the CIA and militant Cuban exile groups in Miami for help in killing Castro. Most of the CIA officials who oversaw Cubela’s involvement with their agency insisted until they died that he had genuinely turned against Castro.

Cubela was arrested in Havana in 1966 and tried for plotting to murder Castro. But during his trial, prosecutors never mentioned the CIA or the poison-tipped pen, accusing him instead of collaborating with Miami exiles. He was convicted and sentenced to death — but the sentence was commuted to a prison term at Castro’s request. He served 12 years as the prison’s doctor, living in comfortable quarters, and was often seen outside, driving the streets. Nearly 80, Cubela reportedly divides his time between Spain and South Florida. Attempts by the Miami Herald to reach him through family members were unsuccessful. [END]

Source: Miami Herald

[Editor’s Note: Brian Latell’s book, Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, is a welcome addition to literature on the JFK assassination and the possibility of Castro’s role in it.

Florentino Aspillaga’s revelation that the DGI had asked him, when he was sixteen, to drop radio surveillance of the CIA hours before the assassination to focus on signals from Texas, is the book’s big eye-opener, although there is other good stuff here.

Much of the material that appears in Latell’s book will seem familiar to persons who have read Gus Russo’s 1998 book Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK and especially Gus Russo and Stephen Molton’s 2008 book, Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, The Castros, and the Politics of Murder, a book that, sadly, very few read. Believe me, it deserves another look.

Curiously, Latell was not only the person who reviewed and slammed Brothers in Arms on Max Holland’s Washington Decoded website but he did it while his own book on he same subject, Castro’s Secrets, was in the works – a fact not revealed in Latell’s review.

Latell writes in his book, “I believe that Castro and a small number of Cuban intelligence officers were complicit in Kennedy’s death but that their involvement fell short of an organized plot. Cuban intelligence officers in Mexico, carrying out standard operational procedures, exhorted Oswald. They encouraged his feral militance. Later they believed he would shoot at Kennedy. But it was his plan and his rifle, not theirs.” [Castro's Secrets, p.231]

It is difficult to see how this differs from Russo and Molton’s assessment four years ago.

In 2008’s Brother in Arms, Russo/Molton wrote: “In Mexico City and Havana, Castro’s agents – and perhaps Fidel himself – hold their collective breath, wondering if their disturbed, newfound wunderkind [Oswald] will actually make the attempt on ‘that bastard’ Kennedy… The Cubans had been wise enough to minimize any links with Lee, while convincing him that he could commit the political crime of the century and get away with it. All he has to do, up to the point of exfiltration, is to proceed with his plan, as a solo act. At most, G2 will have to do little more than encourage him from the wings, in a stage whisper heard only by him.” [Brother in Arms, pp.323-24]

Aren’t Russo/Molton really saying the same thing as Latell – Oswald acted on his own, with encouragement from Cuban intelligence?

Later, Russo/Molton detailed the revelations of Vladimir Rodriguez Lahera, a Cuban intelligence defector, who told the CIA in May, 1964, that Oswald had contacts with Cuban intelligence before his trip to Mexico City, had met them in Mexico City, had maintained contact with them after his return to Texas, and that his contact was Luisa Calderon, the DGI agent at the Cuban Embassy who squealed with delight when Kennedy’s death was announced. [Brother in Arms, p.403] Russo/Molton also detailed the information provided to U.S. intelligence in 1964 by Jack and Morris Childs who revealed that Fidel Castro told them when Oswald was in Mexico City he offered to kill Kennedy. Castro said that his people told him ‘immediately’ that a gringo had come to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, ranting that he would ‘kill that bastard, Kennedy,’ but was quick to add that his regime had turned the offer down as the ravings of a madman. [Brother in Arms, pp.404-05]

Both of these stories figure prominently in Latell’s latest book, including Latell’s comment that Jack Morris’ recollections of his meeting with Castro “have received scant attention in the nearly 50 years since. Yet they provide conclusive evidence that Fidel had been lying about Oswald since November 23, 1963.” [Castro’s Secrets, p.144] Even Latell would have to admit that Russo/Molton were right to include Morris’ revelation in their earlier work, yes? And there is alot more that Russo/Molton wrote about (including the information that Cubela was a double-agent) that also appears in Latell's Castro's Secrets.

Finally, Russo/Molton wrote: “Even if Valdimir hadn’t just made it clear that the Cubans had ongoing contacts with Kennedy’s killer, [based on the information provided by Jack and Morris Childs] Fidel would at least be guilty of having passive inside knowledge of a plot on Kennedy’s life and done nothing to stop it.” [Brothers in Arms, p.405]

From my vantage point, it seems to me that Latell and Russo/Molton are on the same page when it comes to assessing Fidel Castro’s role in the JFK assassination, despite Latell's pooh-poohing the earlier Russo/Molton work.

It’s also worth noting that other Latell sources in Cuban intelligence, that he would rather let the reader think are unique, were also in Russo’s works first (e.g. Aspillaga, Rodriguez Menier, Rodriguez LaHera, etc.). In addition, documents and quotes that first appeared in Russo’s books are either uncredited or sourced erroneously.

In fact, Russo wrote a detailed history of Cuban intelligence provocations on the Brothers in Arms website, which covers much of what Latell is getting so much attention for now. With so much of Russo's work repackaged here, it’s surprising, if not shocking, that he gets absolutely no credit for it in Latell’s pages.

In any event Latell’s book, and the impressive Russo/Molton work before him, offers disturbing information about what Castro knew and when he knew it and may prove to be the key to unraveling the who and why of the Kennedy assassination.]

Latell, Brian, Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Release date: April 24, 2012