“Dean of Cold War Historians” on James Forrestal

His name is a simple one, but it is not a common one, and it’s not often in the news, so that makes it rather easy to forget.  Fortunately, there’s an easy way to call it up.  All you have to do it to turn to the “senior citizen’s memory,” the Internet, and search “dean of Cold War historians.”  It doesn’t matter whether you use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo.  They all agree that the native Texan, Yale University history professor, longtime George W. Bush friend and admirer and CFR member, John Lewis Gaddis is the man.  When it comes to what Gaddis has had to say about a vitally important American leader in the early years of the Cold…

FULL ARTICLE

Untruths in Forrestal Book Review

The latest reviewer of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal, one “Robert Buckley,” (kin to William F.?) en route to giving it just two stars—compared to the 4.5 out of 5 average of 205 customer reviews—has the following to say on Amazon.com: I agree with the other commenters who said that the book needs a good editor. There’s too much information of doubtful relevance. Martin makes a pretty good case that the Zionists had a motive to kill Forrestal, but as any lawyer knows, motive by itself does not prove a case. There must be other evidence.  Martin, for example, fails to give us any suggestion of how the “murder” could actually have been carried out. Forrestal was in…

FULL ARTICLE

An “Adult Content” YouTube Video

On August 4, I received this rather surprising email: Hi David Martin, We wanted to let you know that our team has reviewed your content and we don’t think it’s in line with our Community Guidelines.  As a result, we’ve age-restricted the following content: Video:  At What a Cost We haven’t applied a strike to your channel, and your content is still live for some users on YouTube.  Keep reading for more details on what this means and steps you can take if you’d like to appeal this decision. What “age-restricted” means We age-restrict content when we don’t think it’s suitable for younger audiences.  This means it will not be visible to users who are logged out, are under 18 years…

FULL ARTICLE

Godfather of Soviet Containment Is Cancel Culture Victim

In early 2020, I sent an email to 14 members of the history faculty of my alma mater, Davidson College, including one emeritus professor, whose primary purpose was to call their attention to a recent article by Laurent Guyénot entitled, “Fifteen Years before Kennedy, Zionists Murdered Forrestal.”  I have no idea how it was generally received, because only the emeritus professor responded, and, curiously, he ignored the main subject and chose to take issue with my take on the U.S. Civil War as he deduced from my article, “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech,” which I had alluded to in passing in the email. You can read about the episode in the beginning of my review article, “Life in the Confederate…

FULL ARTICLE

Google, Tool of the Deep State

Was Vince Foster’s Murder over Pedophilia?   The work on this article began when I recently stumbled across a quite well-made video on YouTube by an outfit called Traditionalist Tolkienist.  It had been up since February of 2020, and if you can believe YouTube’s viewer count, very few people had watched it up to that point.  I began to wonder how the excellent video had remained so obscure for more than a year, so, as a first step, I did a search using the default search engine for my Mac computer, which happens to be Google, for the video’s title, “Vince Foster: The Deep State’s Worst Murder Cover-up.” At this point, you’ll have to take my word for it, but…

FULL ARTICLE

Ken Starr’s Contempt for Your Intelligence

In memoriam: Patrick J. Knowlton, 12/19/1954 – 4/21/2021 A great American Imagine if some two decades later one of the lawyers who was primarily responsible for the Warren Commission Report were to write a book accentuating the report’s virtues and attacking its many critics.  Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because just such a book was written by David Belin, whose articles used to show up with some regularity in the mainstream media doing just that.  Now, a very similar book has come out that does the same thing with regard to the death of Bill Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr.  One of its revelations is that its author is a former colleague and apparent…

FULL ARTICLE

Jefferson Davis, in His Own Words

Unlike his adversary in what is inaccurately called the American Civil War and is imprecisely called the War between the States, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the North’s war to end Southern secession, was not a lawyer.  Born in Kentucky like Abraham Lincoln, he was a West Point graduate and career army officer who got into politics in Mississippi, where his family had moved when he was young. There’s quite a bit of irony here.  First, his military background seemed not to have helped him very much as a war leader, especially in many of his personnel decisions; his counterpart, Lincoln, seemed to be a good deal better at it, in spite of the generally lower quality…

FULL ARTICLE

CIA Election Meddling

In recent history, the only American president who has garnered anything resembling the bad press that Donald Trump consistently received was Jimmy Carter in the latter stages of his presidency.  Probably not coincidentally, Carter and Trump were both ushered out of the Oval Office after one term.  In the 24 years since George H.W. Bush was top dog for one term, we had three presidents in Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama who were smiled upon by the press.  Their gentle press treatment was exemplified by the conduct of their press conferences. Clinton was the best actor of the three, making it appear that he had chosen the reporter he was calling on spontaneously.  Bush wasn’t nearly as good…

FULL ARTICLE

Vince Foster, Race, and Davidson College Snowflakes

It seemed like a good idea.  President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was a member of Davidson College’s graduating class of 1967.  He is listed among the college’s notable alumni on its Wikipedia page.  He died mysteriously, as you may recall, six months to the day after Clinton’s presidential inauguration, his body having been discovered lying behind a berm deep in a Civil War relic, Fort Marcy Park, off the George Washington Parkway across the Potomac River from the capital in Virginia.  My article, “Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol Quillen on Corruption” deals primarily with that case. One would think that the article might be of interest to my fellow graduates of the…

FULL ARTICLE

Kavanaugh Stabbed Supporters, Nation in the Back over Vote

Looking back now at the great Presidential election theft of 2020, it becomes ever clearer that the best chance to bring it to a halt and reverse course was represented by the lawsuit of the state of Texas challenging the election result in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin (summarized in the American Thinker here).  Texas was joined by 126 members of the U.S. Congress and 17 state attorneys general in an amicus brief.  The suit and the brief argue, I believe very persuasively, that authority granted by the Constitution to the state legislatures in choosing presidential electors was usurped by the executive branch in each of those states, creating novel voting systems that virtually invited…

FULL ARTICLE

Letter to William Styron about Vince Foster’s Death

The most famous former student of my alma mater, Davidson College, future President Woodrow Wilson, only spent one year there before transferring to Princeton.  Were it not for Secretary of State Dean Rusk and mystery writer Patricia Cornwell, one might well say that the college’s most famous students never graduated from the college, because NBA star Stephen Curry has yet to do so and, like Wilson, the subject of this article, Wilson’s fellow Virginia native William Styron spent only one year at Davidson before transferring away, in his case to Duke. Styron had a curious special article in Newsweek magazine on April 18, 1994, that caught my eye.  It was about the mysterious death of the 1967 Davidson graduate, deputy…

FULL ARTICLE

Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol Quillen on Corruption

Dear President Quillen, On June 1 of this year, you sent out a message to the Davidson College community in which you said “systemic racism” was a big problem in the country.  On June 10, a substantial number of others at Davidson went even further along those lines with their “Faculty Statement of Systemic Racism and Injustice.” I believe that I have effectively rebutted those claims as laid out in my October 15 article, “Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke.”  But the recent presidential election has brought to a head a much more serious and demonstrable systemic malady that infects the country, and that is corruption.  Unfortunately, the academic community, hardly any less than the journalistic and entertainment communities and the…

FULL ARTICLE

Divine Intervention in Trump Vote Challenge?

Late last week we encountered this surprising and disturbing announcement: “President Trump’s campaign has tasked David Bossie, his deputy campaign manager in 2016 and the head of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, to lead its efforts to challenge election results in several states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to a person familiar with the decision.” It’s surprising because Bossie appears to be manifestly unqualified for the task.  Most obviously, that is because these challenges are legal challenges, and Bossie is not a lawyer.  In fact, from what I have been able to learn, the Massachusetts native, Bossie, hardly even has any college education, having “dropped out [from Towson University] to pursue politics.”  Other than politics, the only thing that…

FULL ARTICLE

Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke

I graduated from Davidson College in 1965.  President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., who died violently and mysteriously in 1993, graduated in 1967. My senior year there I was the secretary of the Young Democrats Club and Vince was a member.  At about the same height, we also matched up against one another in intramural basketball.  I had known that the college had changed quite a bit since our graduation, but developments in the past two years have come down on me like a ton of bricks.  Had Vince lived, I don’t think he would recognize his old college.  Unfortunately, from all I have seen lately, Davidson is not all that atypical of colleges and universities…

FULL ARTICLE

When Bill Kristol Heard the Vince Foster Witness Story

Guest article by Hugh Turley The headquarters of the conservative Heritage Foundation is located on the edge of Capitol Hill a block east of Union Station. I have attended quite a few functions there in their main auditorium to hear interesting speakers. They serve refreshments in a little anteroom where one can socialize with other attendees, often including the guest speaker. In this instance in the first week of March 1996, the speaker was the influential editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, William Kristol. I don’t recall his topic. I had been working with Patrick Knowlton, the key witness in the matter of the July 20, 1993, mysterious death of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel in president Bill…

FULL ARTICLE

Fear Theater

Marching to the beat of the mainstream media’s drum, Joe Biden and Democratic presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, have called on the nation’s governors to order everyone in the United States to wear a mask while outdoors for the next three months “at a minimum.” It’s bad enough that such an order would violate basic liberty, but there is no good evidence that the wearing of such masks does the first thing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. “Infectious viral respiratory diseases primarily spread via very fine aerosol particles that are in suspension in the air. Any mask that allows you to breathe therefore allows for transmission of aerosolized viruses.” A number of studies have shown that even in the…

FULL ARTICLE

Abe Lincoln, Anti-Catholic?

Hugh Turley and I begin Chapter 19, “Pope Francis and Thomas Merton,” of our 2018 book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, this way: On September 24, 2015, Pope Francis became the first pope to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He singled out four Americans to mention as model citizens, Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and Thomas Merton. Three of them were advocates for peace. Lincoln, by contrast, embarked upon a war of choice to bring the residents of seceding states back into the Union, a war that would become the nation’s deadliest. Lincoln’s contemporary, Pope Pius IX, hardly shared Pope Francis’ admiration for the unreligious president. Although the Vatican officially favored the Union…

FULL ARTICLE

YouTube “Crucifies” COVID-19 “Savior”

On the morning of July 9, I received the following email from one of my contacts, with the subject, “Banned video hurry!” YouTube took this down earlier.  Someone put it back up.  Try to view before it vanishes again. https://youtu.be/hM5Xut5oUeY I quickly followed the advice, and what I saw was a very persuasive presentation by a medical doctor from Texas by the name of Brian Proctor on how he and a colleague had been 100% successful through the early treatment of COVID-19 patients with Hydroxychloroquine and other inexpensive, readily available drugs. Why on earth, I wondered, would YouTube take such valuable information as this down? Surely it must have just been some technical foul up that caused it to go…

FULL ARTICLE

Life in the Confederate Army

Not Fighting for Slavery   There is no chain so heavy or yoke so oppressive as that which men will unwittingly place upon their own necks, or bend their necks to receive, while being beguiled and led along by liberty shriekers under their pretended banner of freedom. – William Watson   On February 16, I sent the following email to the 14 members of the history faculty at my alma mater, Davidson College, as well as to one emeritus history faculty member. They were all open copied. At the same time, I blind copied 148 members of my class. At the closing of the email, I identified myself as a member of the graduating class of 1965: My freshman English professor…

FULL ARTICLE

The Balfour Declaration’s Bitter Fruit

Most people these days think of the state of Israel as a sort of payback to the Jewish people for the suffering visited upon them by Adolf Hitler and the awful Nazis during World War II; never mind that the people of Palestine had nothing to do with that. Hardly anyone realizes that the die had already been cast in 1937 for the sort of partition of Palestine that the United Nations performed in 1948, giving rise to today’s state of Israel. That was the year that Britain’s Peel Commission came up with its plan to resolve the problem of the growing turbulence resulting from its own policy of permitting ever growing numbers of Jewish Europeans to settle in the region.…

FULL ARTICLE