ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME

In the summer of 63 there was yet another racial murder. Black activist Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he got out of his car in his home town of Decatur, Mississippi. The good ol boys knew the perpetrator and eventually local Klansman Byron le Beckworth was arrested and tried. Disgustingly the all white jury twice acquitted him and Medgar’s family had to wait another 30 years for justice to be done. Both Phil Ochs and Dylan were moved to write a song about his murder, with Bob’s being titled “Only a pawn in their game.” But only a pawn in whose game?
Meanwhile Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after getting into a fight with an anti Castro Cuban exile. He was giving out leaflets for the New Orleans branch of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” a pro Castro organisation, at the time. The two protagonists went on TV to explain their animosity and Oswald admitted he had Marxist leanings and was a fan of Fidel. He also went on a local radio show to explain his political beliefs. Many people now believe that fight was staged, especially when you discover that Oswald was the only member of the New Orleans branch of the Committee and the address on the leaflets was the office block of ex FBI man and anti communist Guy Bannister. Was Oswald also being used as a pawn in a game?

FROM WITCH HUNTS TO WATERGATE

From “If I had a Hammer” to “American Pie”
We all use music as reference points in our lives usually a song that reminds us of a special relationship or event. But some lyrics seem to take on a deeper significance and come to represent political, cultural or social upheavals in society. And there were plenty of those in fifties and sixties America, especially the rise of the civil rights and anti Vietnam War movements. These two struggles succeeded in mobilising hundreds of thousands of people, black and white, onto the streets of America, in such a show of strength that the powers that be were terrified into using the weapons of the totalitarian state to try and stop them. These included burglary, wire taps, surveillance, and the use of agents provocateur to foment violence and assassination. But why use such fascistic tactics to destroy two perfectly legitimate democratic movements? Because they had one thing in common. The leaders of both struggles recognised that radical political change was required in America to bring about the type of society that wouldn’t treat blacks as second class citizens and wouldn’t send boys to foreign shores to kill people fighting for their own independence, as ironically Americans had once done against the British. And there was one man in particular whose magnetism and charisma managed to bring together these two movements and mould them into one. Martin Luther King.
Forty years later it is still the received wisdom that Martin was killed by a racist because of his fight for equality for black people. Yes James Earle Ray was a racist and yes he did play a part in the killing. But as in the case of Lee Harvey Oswald he didn’t have the logistical back up needed to pull off a hit of this magnitude and was therefore part of a wider conspiracy. And more to the point, Civil rights had been enshrined in law in 1964; Dr. King was executed in 68, a year to the day after he made a speech at the Riverside Church against the Vietnam War later concluding,

Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

Martin had crossed the line and uttered the dreaded S word “socialism,” guaranteed to get the rich and powerful foaming at the mouth. So after getting rid of the Kennedy bothers and Martin Luther King his antithesis was brought to power, a man called Richard Nixon. And when he became superfluous to requirements he also had to go.
The struggle for civil rights and the anti Vietnam War protests which Martin personified created great music from the likes of Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton and many of their songs are on my jukebox. My story “Play it again Uncle Sam” takes a satirical look at the hidden history of post war America that the CIA has only recently begun to shed light on, and is related through sixty tracks that have come to denote the era. It starts with the hysteria of the witch hunts and the rise of Richard Nixon and ends with the hysteria surrounding Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And if there is one song that captures this “death of innocence” in America more than any other, it is Don McLean’s American Pie. I use the chronology of his song in my book, so Track one “That’ll be the day” starts us off with the death of Buddy Holly in 59, the story then goes back in time to the start of the fifties then forward again through the sixties and ends in the mid seventies with Watergate and the defeat in Vietnam. Please go to www.playitagainunclesam.com

Who shot President Kennedy? It's a sick game of cluedo.

When CIA veteran of pychological warfare, David Atlee Phillips died, he left behind a manuscript indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald was being manipulated by the intelligence community to play a key role in, or to take the blame for, the assassination of Fidel Castro. This is presumably why Oswald, or someone posing as him, visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City to manufacture that link and why the CIA has continued to deny any knowledge of the event. Phillips also intimated that their plan to frame Oswald was then turned against them and the same plot used to kill Kennedy. But who turned it? It is possible that Castro, who'd probably learned of the plot, could have been behind it but its far more likely it was a home grown conspiracy, especially given the CIA's symbiotic relationship with the Mafia. US and Cuban mobsters were heavily involved with "the French Connection" through which large quantities of heroin was being imported into America. And in 1963, Robert Kennedy,in his capacity as Attorney General, was getting ever closer to arresting and deporting its ringleaders, notably Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santos Trafficante of Tampa, Florida. The problem was these were the same men the CIA had involved in the plotting to kill Castro and men who thought they were doing their patriotic duty by killing commies for Uncle Sam. They were therefore underwhelmed by the treatment they were receiving from the Kennedys. So they had the motive and the logistical know how to carry out the hit and frame Oswald. But their partners in crime, namely in the attempts to kill Castro, were the CIA. So were agents of theirs involved in Kennedy's death. Was David Atlee Phillips being coy when he intimated he didn't know who had turned his plot to kill Castro. Was he involved. Its like a sick game of cluedo. So was it Miss Scarlet of Havana, Colonel Mustard of the CIA or Reverend Green of the Mafia? Read my latest novel on the subject "Play it again Uncle Sam" and go to
www.playitagainunclesam.com for further details.

The day the music died

When Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were all killed in a plane crash in 1959, a young Don Mclean could be forgiven for thinking that the rock n roll rebel music he was just beginning to identify with, had literally died with them. And ironically, a decade later, "the generation lost in space" lost three of its icons. The deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison also seemed to mark the end of an era as the hippy ideal of peace and love evaporated into cynicism and drug abuse. The father, son and holy ghost had taken the last train to the coast. But as was the case with Buddy, Bopper and Ritchie, what a musical legacy.
[ Go to view my profile and then my second blog spot called iconic songs of the sixties. Or go to www.playitagainunclesam.com