U.S. Ratchets Up Censorship

Welcome to the Amazon aquarium,
Where you can swim without care.
If you only go where you're supposed to,
You won't even know that you're there.

But thanks to my contrariness,
An upsetting thing came to pass,
Determined to showcase the truth,
I discovered the glass.

Here are a couple of customer book reviews of interest that are currently on the Amazon.com web site: 

He really cares a great deal about giving all of the various points of view…

Having arrived at this subject matter by way of a recommendation of DC Dave (David Martin), I was a newcomer to the writing of the author Mike Campbell. I believe that Mr. Campbell is one of the most talented and passionate authors of non-fiction I’ve ever encountered. He really cares a great deal about presenting all of the various points of view, arguments and opinions of the numerous researchers and authors who have attempted to solve this mystery over the past decades. I find this book as the major authoritative compilation or encyclopedia of all previous works on the subject of Amelia Earhart & Fred Noonan. Mr. Campbell is concerned with one primary element, and that is providing the reader with the straight truth. No sugar coating of anything or anyone in this book. There is a tremendous number of persons, dates, locations, and historical facts to keep track of, but throughout this work Mr. Campbell presents the unvarnished truth concerning all. You will have no doubt about what really happened when you finish reading this book.   – Michael A. Hawkins, April 24, 2018, review of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last 2nd edition

It is very humbling to follow DC Dave’s review…

…considering that I am just a former naval officer interested in finding out what I can about the Navy that I loved and hated.
As I read more books about the Navy I am fascinated by a trend that emerges that truly typifies “Don’t rock the boat”
This attitude was definitely present in my short 8 year career in “this man’s Navy”
This biography of Forrestal is a rather sad portrayal of someone who virtually gave his life to serve his country.
“Driven Patriot” could not have been titled any more appropriately.
In a time when so few people choose to join the military, here was a man who gave up a great deal to serve his country.
Reading about his personal life is a little like peeking in an open window but Forrestal’s relationships with Adm King and others was fascinating. His personal life took a back seat to his appointment but there is far more to his life than his being a patriotic workaholic.
It is ironic that the catastrophic fire that occurred on the USS Forrestal is now a primer for how to deal with fires on board ships.
Am anxious to explore the resources that DC Dave cites but for now I would heartily recommend this book as just another piece of the puzzle that allowed the Greatest Generation to overcome the zealous Axis nations.  – Island Sailor, July 15, 2013, review of Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal

This one, whose title I did not record, I see has been taken down:

Some time ago I wrote a book review on Amazon of Peter Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic. There are similarities between that case and this case that Mr. DC Dave has opened up for us in his in-depth and mesmerizing analysis, “Looking at Washington corruption through a keyhole.” When I read the review, I had a strong sense of not looking through a keyhole, but rather being introduced to a criminal investigation “with the double doors shot wide open on either side.” There is no beating around the bushes here! On the contrary, in every line Mr. DC Dave cuts straight through to the core, lightens up as he goes and adds information which, in his opinion, should already have been in the book from the beginning. Why not write his own book about this subject? I welcome it, and so would many others. – Harald Jan, November 15, 2015, review of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster by Christopher Ruddy.*

Here is the now-deleted review that Jan was talking about.

As of September 21, 2025, the title of “Island Sailor’s” review is out of date.  There is no longer a DC Dave review there for him to follow.  That’s when Amazon, in language that even George Orwell could hardly have dreamed up, brought down the hammer and removed all of my many book reviews from its web site.  The subject line saying “Important information regarding your Amazon posts” was so unthreatening that it would be easy for a person to overlook it, especially when the person sending it was “Community Help-Amazon.”  In fact, I had overlooked their first warning to me on September 16 and hadn’t opened it in my very full inbox.  I had to go back and find it after discovering their September 21 blockbuster:

Obviously, in the eyes of Jeff Bezos and the folks at Amazon, I have been a very naughty boy, but how so?  They don’t make it easy.  You even have to copy and paste the URLs they provide where they promise to provide answers, because they don’t make them hot links, and they don’t say when that initial warning was sent, who sent it, and what the subject line of that earlier warning was.  Fortunately, the initial warning had come only five days before, so I didn’t have to scroll back too far to find it, and I correctly guessed that it had also come from them with the same misleading, unthreatening subject.  Here is what it said:

Bad, Bad DC Dave

So, what is it that I did that was out of compliance with their policies, that is to say, that violated their precious, apparently quite delicate “Community Guidelines,” after all these years?  That earlier warning was a bit more informative, listing six lines that I might have stepped over and telling me that I’d better go back and fix it or I risk being banished from their “Community,” whatever that means.  My missing that first warning, it turns out, made no difference in what resulted.  I had used no profanity, I had harassed no one, had used no hate speech, had shown no spite toward anyone, and had provided no sexual content or engaged in any illegal activity.  I can’t imagine what changes I could have made in any of my three recent book reviews, at that point, to put me in right with the “Community.”

It’s clear to me, though, that it was my uncharacteristic spate of book-reviewing activity in September that caught the attention of the Amazon censors.  The genesis of that activity was the confluence of two things.  First, I made the discovery that the bedrock book of the cover-up of the obvious assassination of America’s first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, the 1963 book, James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy by Arnold A. Rogow was available on Amazon, and, to date, it had received only one review, which was very short and favorable, giving it five stars.  I couldn’t, in good conscience, let that situation stand.  I had to do my part to correct the record with my own review.  Second, I have been reminded by messages in my inbox that I have a large and growing number of followers on Substack, and I could make the review of the Rogow book perform double duty by putting it up on Substack.  Then I thought of a couple of other book reviews that I had posted on my web site and circulated but had never put up on Amazon.  They are my reviews of The Money and The Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America by Sally Denton and Roger Morris and Black 9/11: Money, Motive, and Technology by Mark Gaffney.

I posted my reviews of the three books each two days after the other, starting with my review of the Rogow book on September 10.  To conform to their length requirements, I had to shorten my previously published reviews of The Money and the Power and Black 9/11 only a little bit.  The links to the original versions of their reviews are behind the titles.  Here is my complete Amazon review of the Rogow book as I posted it on Substack, except that I forgot to give the title I used.  I’m providing it here from memory:

A propaganda book of great importance

If you want to be badly misinformed about the suspicious death of America’s first Secretary of Defense, this is the book for you. Rogow’s purpose is to persuade readers that James Forrestal more or less went crazy and, after weeks of confinement in a room on the 16^th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, he finally tried to hang himself out of the window of a kitchen across the hall from that room, and the sash that he had tied to the radiator under the window somehow didn’t hold and he fell to his death (would you believe?).

The book is replete with confident-sounding assertions for which Rogow has no references and key statements of supposed fact that have been proven to be false. For brevity’s sake, we shall offer only two examples. The first is referring to the day of Forrestal’s supposed breakdown as he has returned home from his last day at the Pentagon:

“In the privacy of his home Forrestal confessed to [Ferdinand] Eberstadt that he was a complete failure and that he was considering suicide. He also expressed the conviction that a number of individuals—Communists, Jews, and certain persons in the White House—had formed a conspiracy to ‘get’ him, and had finally succeeded. He insisted that some of ‘them’ were probably in his home at that very moment, and he proceeded to search closets and other areas of the house where they might be hiding.”

Eberstadt, one must assume, must be the source for that assertion, but Rogow has no reference to any document or statement from Forrestal’s supposed closest friend and confidant, the New York investment banker Eberstadt. One may search the historical record high and low for direct verification of Rogow’s sensational claims, and he will not find them. Rogow also tells us that Forrestal returned from the Pentagon to an empty house in the company of an “aide,” whose identity he fails to share with his readers. We later learn from the much better Forrestal biography, “Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal,” by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, that, in fact, Forrestal’s longtime Filipino butler, who went by his first name of “Remy,” was at the house, and we learn from a number of sources, including the aide himself, that the man was Forrestal’s top assistant, Marx Leva. A likely reason why Rogow did not identify Leva is because what Leva later had to say in an oral history interview by the Truman Library undercuts almost everything that Rogow tells us about what happened at the house, and Leva’s interview in no way supports that supposed account from Eberstadt through Rogow.

Perhaps Rogow’s most important proven falsehood concerns the night of Forrestal’s death:

“Late on the evening of May 21 Forrestal informed the Naval Corpsman on duty that he did not want a sedative or sleeping pill and that he was planning to stay up rather late and read. When the Corpsman looked in at approximately 1:45 on the morning of Sunday, May 22, Forrestal was copying onto several sheets of paper Sophocles’s brooding ‘Chorus from Ajax’…”

How does Rogow know that that’s what the Navy corpsman did and saw? As with his supposed account by Eberstadt he has no reference. And just as he doesn’t name Marx Leva, he doesn’t name the corpsman, who was identified in the newspapers at the time as Robert Wayne Harrison. Rogow also gives readers the false impression that Harrison was the regular attendant for that time of night, which he was not. He was in his second night of filling in for C. F. Suthers. Hoopes and Brinkley don’t name him, but they tell us that he had gone AWOL, although they have no verification for their assertion that that was the reason why there was a substitute on duty.

The really Important thing, though, Is that, according to Harrison’s own testimony before a Navy review board, what Rogow told us was not true (Rogow tells us correctly in a terse footnote that the board’s report—quite amazingly so, we might add—had not been made public). Thanks to this reviewer’s FOIA request, the board’s report was made public in 2004, and here is the key testimony from Harrison:

Q. How many times did you speak to Mister Forrestal between the time you took over the watch and the time he was missing?
A. Approximately three or four times.

Q. Did you notice anything unusual about Mister Forrestal’s behavior during that time?
A. No, sir, I didn’t.

Q. Did he say anything to you that would lead you to believe that he was in any way disturbed?
A. No, sir, he didn’t.

Q. At what time did you last see Mister Forrestal?
A. It was one forty-five, sir.

Q. Where was he then?
A. He was in his bed, apparently sleeping.

Q. Where were you at that time?
A. I was in the room when I saw him.

So much for the copying of that morbid poem, and so much for Arnold Rogow’s credibility.

(For Substack readers who want a fleshing out of the conflicting [all false] accounts of what happened at Forrestal’s home, see chapter 2 of the second edition of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal. One might notice that the Rogow book was published by Macmillan Publishers, one of the Big Five, as Wikipedia tells us.)

There you have it, the three book reviews that got the folks at Amazon all in a lather.  It looks to me that I must have been found guilty of a sort of Amazon thought crime in which some anonymous people at the company have performed the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury, with no defense permitted. 

Well, you might say, they gave me an opportunity to offer a defense by sending me that first warning, which, as they saw it, I ignored.  So, in fairness, let’s see what we find by checking out the Community Guidelines at the site to which they invited me.  There we find a list of 13 bullet points of things that are not allowed:

• Seller, order, or shipping feedback
• Comments about pricing or availability
• Content written in unsupported languages
• Repetitive text, spam, or pictures created with symbols
• Private information
• Profanity or harassment
• Hate speech
• Sexual content
• External links
• Ads, conflicts of interest, promotional content
• Compensated reviews
• Plagiarism, infringement, or impersonation
• Illegal activities

Just looking at that list, all I can say is, “Not guilty, Your Honor.”  Put me before a jury of my peers who would read my articles, and I guarantee you that my reviews would have to be restored to Amazon in a heartbeat, but, as I say, they’re the prosecutor, judge, and juror.  The closest thing to a transgression of those rules that I can think of was the fact that I saw fit to make comments on the Rogow book on James Forrestal and his death.  One can read the reviews for it on Amazon and see that I am the author of the definitive book on Forrestal’s death entitled The Assassination of James Forrestal.  Who is better qualified to write a review of Rogow’s book?  One might invoke that “conflict of interest” prohibition and say that by putting down Rogow I nudge readers in the direction of my own book, but it’s a stretch. I don’t know how long that old book had been up on Amazon, but the fact that it had only one review tells me that it has drawn virtually no attention.  It would be a very odd way for me to promote my own book, especially when I make no mention of it, when mention of it might have been called for to strengthen my argument.  Furthermore, if that “conflict” perception is their problem, they could have just told me that.  I wouldn’t have liked it but just taking that one review down for that reason wouldn’t have caused me to lose much sleep.  Virtually no one would have been likely to have seen it there, anyway.  I’m sure a lot more folks have already read it on Substack than would have ever read it on Amazon, and I think I’ve already demonstrated to the world with my book and a host of articles online that the late Arnold Rogow was not to be trusted when it came to the matter of James Forrestal’s death.

Clearly the die was cast before I posted that fourth review, which is thoroughly unpolitical and should have been uncontroversial.  The book in question is The Life and Times of Wilber Hardee: Founder of Hardee’s.  Similar to the Rogow book, though it is much more current, it had only one posted review, which was generally favorable, and it was also on a subject that I might know more about than any writer alive.  I had to do my part to set the record straight. Here is how my review appears on Substack:

An Intrepid but Flawed Man’s Flawed Story

Wilber Hardee started quite a few restaurants in his long career and all of them eventually went out of business. He was simply not a very good manager, and he was apparently not an easy person to get along with. That started very close to home, because he admits to cheating repeatedly on his first wife in the book. But concerning his restaurants, he even had a chain of fast-food hamburger restaurants in Eastern North Carolina on the McDonald’s model. But that chain was not named “Hardee’s.” It was called “Little Mint,” which you can read about in the book.

Maybe it was his untruthfulness that made him a bad businessman. One can see it right there on display in the very misleading subtitle of his book, “Founder of Hardee’s.” He was not the founder of the Hardee’s food chain. As a restaurateur in Greenville, NC, he had traveled to Greensboro to observe the operation of the first McDonald’s in the state and was inspired. He built a similar restaurant with the exception that it was more like a stationary food truck with no inside space for people to sit and eat. Charcoal grilling had just come into fashion in the country, so he gave his hamburgers the twist of being grilled over charcoal.

Leonard Rawls, the accountant son of the Rocky Mount owner of the construction company that built Hardee’s in Greenville, was inspired by Hardee’s venture, and working with Hardee and with Jim Gardner, the son of the Gardner’s Dairy owner in Rocky Mount, who mainly provided financing, Rawls opened a second Hardee’s restaurant in Rocky Mount with the same menu, but this one was a full sit-down restaurant. Rawls was the man who founded Hardee’s Food Systems, which is the Hardee’s chain of restaurants as we know it. The mendacious Hardee has told a couple of mutually exclusive stories as to how he was “snookered” out of the business bearing his name, but the fact of the matter is that he sold out his part of Hardee’s before it became a chain of restaurants. One can read the full story online in my article, “Leonard Rawls, Wilber Hardee, and Hardee’s Restaurants: Creating a Chain-Restaurant Foundation Myth.”

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RCPTM4WN9384J/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8

I have supplied the link to my article here, which Amazon does not allow one to do.

I think you would agree that that one hardly qualifies as the straw that broke the camel’s back.   What really got me crossways with Amazon was what I reveal about our Deep State with those first three articles.  There is no way that Amazon could specify what they think I did to violate their precious “Community Guidelines” without making themselves look very bad.  I committed truth, and they don’t like it one bit.

Amazon’s Bad Record 

I should be the last one to be surprised at this most recent outrageous action by Amazon.   Consider the information in my two previous articles, “Censored by Amazon,” and “Amazon Censorship Hits Home.”  In that first article I reveal that Amazon simply refused, without explanation, to put up my heavy-duty review of Phillip Nelson’s powerful Remember the Liberty!: Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas.  I also talk about how, after years of listing mine as the top critical review of Christopher Ruddy’s book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, they had recently gone to ingenious and very dishonest lengths to hide the review away from its readers.  Now, as we see they’ve taken the final logical step and found an excuse to erase it entirely.  I top it off by noting that, in the past, Amazon reviews have served a valuable educational purpose.  It was through reading one of them that I learned of the attempt of the Zionist Stern Gang to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1947 with a letter bomb, a fact ignored by most of the press, historians, and all Truman’s biographers except for his daughter, Margaret.  It was also ignored by Wikipedia until I wrote my article based on this discovery.

In the second article I talk about how Amazon has systematically excluded from its offerings books that approach the World War II Jewish “holocaust” narrative from a critical perspective, elaborate further on my own experience with Amazon, and top it off with a link to an article about how Amazon systematically excluded negative reviews of a book by Hillary Clinton.

But why, one might wonder, didn’t I title the article, “Amazon Ratches Up Censorship”?  It is because Amazon has unprecedented power over the American book market, a major source of information.  Amazon censorship is, in effect, American censorship.  According to this site, 50% of all print books sold in the United States are from Amazon, but that seems like a very conservative number, considering the disappearance of almost all of our bookstores, driven out of business by Amazon.  And consider the fact that Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Washington Post.  Lord Acton would hardly be surprised at the resulting corruption that we are witnessing.

I could be upset at the personal affront by Amazon in removal of all my book reviews with what amounts to no explanation or justification at all, but I’m hardly the big loser here.  I have other, better ways of reaching my audience.  The big losers are the public.  Amazon is, with malice aforethought, depriving them of important information and opinion.

David Martin

*I have since taken Mr. Jan’s advice and published The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair.