Why doesn't Admiral Burkley receive more attention?

[Benjamin Cole]

LP--

I enjoyed your post.

AI version: Burkley's lawyer contacted the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 to assert that Burkley possessed information indicating a multi-person participation in the assassination, but formal testimony was never recorded

Seems like an oversight on the part of the HSCA, a body that usually did good work.

There are reasons to have reasonable doubts regarding the WC narrative of the JFKA, foremost that the operating instructions from President LBJ were to find nothing that might trigger a nuke war.

The HSCA, also not staffed by kooks, concluded there had been a JFKA comspiracy.

My two cents: Where the JFKA research community has gone wrong is in relying on ideology to frame narratives--that is the CIA, or powerful US plutocrats perped the JFKA. Lately, it has been Mossad.

But why was President LBJ so concerned? More likely that LHO had ties to Moscow and Havana. Those leads were snuffed out early.

[Lance Payette]

BC -

Thanks for the input. The beauty of Burkley to me is that he had both the Parkland perspective and the Bethesda perspective. If he of all people thought the medical evidence pointed to a conspiracy, I don't know how even the most gung-ho LN zealot can fail to find that troubling. We'll never know exactly what Burkley thought, but what we do know certainly suggests that those like Aguilar cannot be dismissed as kooks.

[Lance Payette]

Realized I'd had a brain fart and said HSCA in several places where I meant AARB in my original post, so I corrected that.

You will note that there was an unexplained 18-month gap between the time Burkley's daughter Nancy Danlea told Horne "sure, no problem" about granting the AARB access to the materials in Illig's office and the time she told Horne "no way." She had been intrigued by what Horne told her in their first conversation - Burkley had never said anything to anyone in the family about a conspiracy (or anything else JFKA-related), and Nancy made the Sprague memo part of the price for granting access. Since Horne really didn't have much to send her, it was surely all sent during the 18-month period. The Sprague memo must have made her eyes pop out. Since she could grant access to the Illig materials, she obviously had access to them herself as the executor of Burkley's estate. My guess is, she looked at the materials and saw something there that likewise made her eyes pop out. She either decided on her own, with the other family members and/or with legal advice that "You do NOT want to get involved in this." That's the only explanation for her complete about-face that makes sense to me. Alas, she died in 2002: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/nancy-denlea-obituary?id=28129080.

[Lance Payette]

Seems like an oversight on the part of the HSCA, a body that usually did good work.

An oversight of epic proportions, no? I would guess that Sprague's resignation under unhappy circumstances almost immediately thereafter must be part of the explanation. Perhaps Lewis and then Blakey weren't aware of the call from Illig - but why wouldn't Illig or Burkley have followed up with one of them after hearing nothing?

Just another day in the JFKA - weird twists and turns everywhere you look.

[Tom Scully]

Realized I'd had a brain fart and said HSCA in several places where I meant AARB in my original post, so I corrected that.

You will note that there was an unexplained 18-month gap between the time Burkley's daughter Nancy Danlea told Horne "sure, no problem" about granting the AARB access to the materials in Illig's office and the time she told Horne "no way." She had been intrigued by what Horne told her in their first conversation - Burkley had never said anything to anyone in the family about a conspiracy (or anything else JFKA-related), and Nancy made the Sprague memo part of the price for granting access. Since Horne really didn't have much to send her, it was surely all sent during the 18-month period. The Sprague memo must have made her eyes pop out. Since she could grant access to the Illig materials, she obviously had access to them herself as the executor of Burkley's estate. My guess is, she looked at the materials and saw something there that likewise made her eyes pop out. She either decided on her own, with the other family members and/or with legal advice that "You do NOT want to get involved in this." That's the only explanation for her complete about-face that makes sense to me. Alas, she died in 2002: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/nancy-denlea-obituary?id=28129080.

The Doug Horne I know, wrote this book review and never amended it, despite two re-writes of the book by its author because the facts forced him to,

https://www.amazon.com/portal/customer-reviews/srp/-/R8NNVIZE9ITM/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&ie=UTF8
Douglas P. Horne ***** A Masterpiece of Biography and a Mesmerizing Detective Story

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mary_s_Mosaic/OGOCDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=mary%27s+mosaic+scully+dieugenio+protege&pg=PT348&printsec=frontcover
Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, ...
books.google.com › books
Peter Janney · 2016
Found inside
... DiEugenio protégé whose name, I discovered, was Tom Scully, but he would identify himself on Amazon only as “Rational Voice.” Discussing his critical post of Mary's Mosaic in an email to a University of Georgia law professor, Scully ...

Doug Horne's reaction to my review of the same book before rewrites,

https://web.archive.org/web/20210615060333/http://jfkforum.com/images/JanneyHorneReacts.jpg
"...What ordinary reader would have the ability to look up and find the citations you so conveniently found?..."

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/20259-the-future-of-the-jfk-forum/page/9/

Robert Charles-Dunne Posted June 16, 2013 (edited)

...But whom should we fault for this? The authors, whose case has not been made beyond a reasonable doubt? Or the members who point out that failing on the authors’ part?

This is multiply true in the case of Peter Janney’s book. John Simkin not only invited Peter here, but I believe provided him with some material aid in preparing his book (please correct me if I’m wrong on this), and subscribes to the book’s central premise that CIA murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer. (As it happens, I am inclined to concur with that assertion. That does not require me - or anyone - to accept Janney’s scenario for the crime if compelling evidence is not presented.)

Both the ousted members found reasonable fault with Janney’s book and demonstrated that some of the evidence presented was underwhelming at best, incorrect at worst. In fact, ex-moderator Tom Scully seemed to have located the man Janney accused of being Mary Meyer’s murderer, a man whom Janney himself claimed he was unable to find. Most of the comments made by the ousted members seemed fair game to me. But then, I don’t have a personal relationship with Peter Janney.

I believe that John has inadvertently admitted that he put his thumb on the scale in Janney’s favour:

“The main reason I did not act on this was because I was part of the argument. If I had tried to restrain these attacks I would have been accused of being biased and interfering with free speech. Even so, it was no real excuse for not protecting a friend.”

If a friend has been proved wrong, as I believe Janney had been by the ousted members, he doesn’t need protection; he needs correction. If he is unwilling to be corrected when shown persuasive evidence by forum members, a true friend shares some harsh truth with him. The alternative is to allow said friend to flail fruitlessly with a demonstrably flawed scenario, an allowance that does no favor to the friend, or the truth. Those who persist in pushing data they know to be wrong are no longer merely mistaken; they are trafficking in falsehoods. It is a disservice to this Forum’s raison d’etre to remain silent in such a case, irrespective of who the trafficker may be.

Those who refused to remain silent were the ones made to pay the price of excommunication, well after Janney ceased to post here.

I have written the foregoing to respond to something directed specifically to me. If DiEugenio and Scully are not re-instated as members, it will be my last post here, for reasons I think I have made sufficiently clear.

[John Corbett]

No one should be taken seriously that believes Doug Horne should be taken seriously.

[Lance Payette]

Since I have never waded through Horne's five-volume ARRB epic, I did wonder if he mentions the Sprague memo or Burkley? If anyone knows, chime in.

With all the wacky things that get attention, I am flummoxed - flummoxed, I tell you - that the Sprague memo and the whole Burkley things just seems to have vanished into the JFKA mist.