The Man on the Grassy Knoll Interview: Part II

Here is the second in a series of interviews with Venture Galleries' Caleb Pirtle on the research and writing of the Man on the Grassy Knoll. This year is the 50th anniversary of the commemoration of the assassination of President Kennedy, and as such, Venture Galleries is re-releasing the book in serial form beginning next week.

http://venturegalleries.com/blog/did-the-warren-commission-know-about-the-man-on-the-grassy-knoll-why-did-they-lie/

Too late for Lance

Not long ago I wrote a blog about why America had lost its love for Lance. The reason is simple. He betrayed us. Sorry for all my friends at Richardson Bike Mart who still stand by him, the truth is, Lance lied.  Over and over and over again.  He told us time after time he had not doped. He called into question the ethics of those who questioned his usage of drugs and tainted blood.

Lance said, “not me.  I’m clean. I’ve won seven times and never been caught.”

Well, Lance, you were caught. You were not clean, so besides being a cheater, you are a liar.  You ruined the reputation of a sport.  You made fools of a governing body trying to do the right thing. You scoffed at the press and you made America look like a sleazy, drug-using culture again.(We are already, you u7st don’t have to rub our noses in it so.)

So I do not feel sorry for Mr. Armstrong.  Not at all.  He broke the rules. He then lied about it. Same reason Barry Bonds and Roger Clements and supposedly Mark McGuire will never get into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Same reason Tricky Dick was driven from office. Same reason bill Clinton was disgraced.

America—the world— could have forgiven you eventually for doping.  Everybody was doing it to get an edge.  We all knew that.  Just come clean back then and say, ‘yeah, I doped.’ It would be over. You wouldn’t have seven yellow jerseys to give back, but your reputation would still be somewhat in tact.

So here is the punishment— your punishment, Mr. Lance Armstrong. We no longer care about you.  Go away.  You are not important to us. You are scum. It is a bit too late for mea culpas. It is too late for us to forgive you and take you back into our hearts.

You have broken ours.

The Interview: Part One.

 I recently sat down for an interview and Venture Galleries was so kind to give my feeble words some space and time. I share them with you now.

Part two on Wednesday.

http://venturegalleries.com/blog/what-about-the-man-on-the-grassy-knoll-the-kennedy-assassination-revisited/

The Kennedy Legacy In Dallas

I got to hear live, the Charlie Rose interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his sister, Rory, the documentary filmmaker last night in Dallas at the Winspear Opera House. It was an exceptional evening and the thought struck me through the night that the Kennedy family has been on the leading edge of change in our nation for almost eight decades.

Like them or not, the Kennedys have played a pivotal role in some of the biggest landmark moments in our country’s recent history.

Both of the young Kennedys were funny and poignant. They recalled good times and hard times that they, as a family, endured. (It is interesting they can talk about the ‘assassination’ and use that word when the city of Dallas can’t in its official commemoration of the events around November 22, 1963. It is as if on one had we want to tip our hat at history, but on the other hand to wash our hands of the act that happened on our streets. Neither of the two Kennedys suffered from the delusional etymology of estranged words for what happened here fifty years ago.)

They were full of stories about their lives, both public and private. One story recounted Robert bringing a dead salamander into the White House for his uncle Jack to see. Jack, looking at the salamander realized that young Robert did not know it was dead, so he suggested releasing the animal into one of the Rose Garden ponds.  They did, where upon the President suggested the lizard was suffering from “an acute lack of animation.”

They also discussed the intense dislike Robert had for J. Edgar Hoover (and vice versa). One time he sent his kids into Hoover’s office just to have some fun. Young Robert was caught with his hands in the fish tank in Hoover’s private office, a prize possession of the FBI director. I would love to have seen that. I am sure the young Mr. Kennedy had a folder with his name on it thereafter in the private files of the FBI’s chief.

Kennedy and Hoover were miles apart on the investigation of and prosecution against the Mafia. Hoover denied the very existence of the Mob, but rather sought out high-profile criminals and “communists” as his leading targets. Under Kennedy’s leadership as Attorney General the number of mafia cases indicted and convicted rose by two hundred fold from the times prior to his arrival at Justice. A fact that never sat well with either the FBI Director nor the mafia.

During part of the evening’s discussion Robert mentioned that his father had not believed in the Warren Commission’s findings. He had secretly conducted some of his own, only to realize that much of the Warren Commission reports were false or grossly overstated and that he believed the Mafia, the CIA and the Cubans acted together in bringing his brother down on the streets of Dallas in November 1963.

Interestingly, that’s the foundation for my book, The Man on the Grassy Knoll. I have stated on several interviews that the Warren Commission, as flawed as its findings were, did its job. That was to shore up America’s confidence in its institutions and to dissuade beliefs that outsiders (or insiders for that matter) could have plotted the death of the President. Americans didn’t want to believe we were that vulnerable. It was okay for one crazy SOB to have a rifle and to take a life at random, but to have a planned execution of a sitting President, carried out by a conspiracy of foreign and domestic forces would never serve the country well. America still suffered under the delusions of the 1950’s and wanted to believe that the institutions we had in place were there protecting us and our democracy. To that end, the Warren Commission was successful. Unfortunately, what they wrote in their final analysis, was mostly fiction.

My work in the same field and the same subject is fiction, too. My novel that is. But the research, which I built that novel upon was certainly not. You will soon be able to read about it again in a serialized format at Venture Galleries. We are going to re-release The Man on the Grassy Knoll, to help commemorate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. If you have not had a chance to read it before now, here is your chance to do so free.  I’ll post another blog as we get closer to the date of re-release.

A final thought. There is a philosophy in the Kennedy family that goes something like this: ‘go out there and do something to make the world a better place for people who aren’t as fortunate as you.’ Considering where we are in America today, I think that is a fine mantra for us all to live by.

A book review by Noah Hart.

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A special thanks to my long-time friend, Noah Hart, for his review and the very kind words.

The Myth Makers

Review by Noah Hart

“Con job or conspiracy? That is the question.”

A few years ago, John Crawley asked me to review his novel, The Man on the Grassy Knoll. I was pleased to do so since he has been a friend for so many years and so supportive of my own work. Plus, I love a good conspiracy. The book was a roaring success. So when I read his newest release, I took it upon myself to write this review.  I can say without any hesitation that The Myth Makers is John’s best novel to date. It is dark, funny, loving, sad, and it will make you spitting mad. And that’s just the first chapter.

The story revolves around an old myth that most of us have heard in one form or another. Growing up in California, I heard it differently from Crawley’s Texas version. But the myth we each heard share so many common elements that one stops nitpicking the differences and focuses on the power that the myth reveals.

A guy makes a device for a car that allows it to generate incredible gas mileage numbers… double, triple or even quadruple its efficiency. That in itself is an interesting story for a planet slowly running out of hydrocarbons… but the plot takes on a deep and darkly sinister cloak when one learns there is a conspiracy to keep the world from knowing of the invention… and that the government or a consortium of companies have acted to not only suppress the news of the invention, but also place the lives of the engineers who created the mysterious energy machine in jeopardy.

Why?

Because there are those who claim the efficiency of the mythological invention is so great that it approaches perpetual energy. Numbers that science thought were impossible. And if those numbers are true, the oil and gas game, the coal game, the nuclear game, the entire energy game, as we know it, is over… lock, stock and barrel.

One reporter, who uncovers the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, stands alone against great odds in getting the story published. His own life is threatened. His own newspaper is folding around him. His former lover (also a reporter) has doubts about the story she has helped him research and write. His editor wants more and more details for proof before going to press: details impossible to deliver, for they are buried with the inventors. Someone gets to the publisher… secret warnings about letting the story loose on the public… threats of boycotts against an already weakening newspaper.  Then a former FBI agent on the lamb because of his own knowledge of the machine tells the reporter, “You’ll never get any ink on this. There are too many powerful people who don’t want this to get out.” The FBI agent goes on to say, “Your story will never see the light of day.”

And with those words you begin to wonder how deep the conspiracy goes. You find out with the very last line of the novel. That is how well Crawley has crafted this suspenseful thriller.

Through lovers and deceit, trials and tragedy, The Myth Makers twists and turns along a path that never travels straight for long and is always diving deep into the shadows that stretch between fact and fiction. The Myth Makers made me very uncomfortable. Because it could very well be true. And it if were, then who has been duping us all these years?  After all, we all have heard snippets of the myth. We all know a bit about it. Whose to say it is not real? And if it is not real, then why the con job? How did the men who made the mythological machine get it into the hands of the government?  And why did the Department of Energy want it so badly? And why has the myth endured for all these years?

The questions will hurl themselves at you at the speed of enlightenment.

The Myth Makers is John Crawley’s 11th novel, his 4th from Venture Galleries. Read it. Carefully.

The start of something new

Happy New Year. Time to start over.to start something new.

 

I couldn’t decide which to write about today, the unleashing of season three of Downton Abby, the Alabama-Notre Dame National Championship game, The demise of the Dallas Cowboys or Chip Kelly staying at Oregon.

I decided on the fact that jerry Jones needs to get out of the managing of the Dallas Cowboys. Go away jerry. Take Romo with you. Get a GM who understands football and understands what it takes to build a winning team.

Okay, kudos to Chip Kelly for not succumbing to big piles of money in the NFL and staying put at a great program in Oregon.

Alabama by three.

The Abby is a wonderful produced soap opera. It has the class of England and the slime of America. It has the war years, the depression years and the struggles of people on their way up and a class on their way out. Sounds like the Cowboys, when you think about it.

Hope your New Year was good. Black-eyed peas and all of that. I look forward to capturing the events of 2013 and royally pissing off a bunch of my friends with outlandish ideas of what is right and what is wrong with the universe in which we live.

Too many guns in America.  (And according to the fools at the FBI, too many hammers, as well.)

That’s all there needs to be said on that.

Let’s make 2013 a great year and a safe year.

Bluegrass gold

Happy New Year, folks.

Yesterday I read where a friend of mine was taking a horseback ride through the snow in Big Bend National Park. I thought, wow, what a great vacation. I was jealous. What an adventure. Then I tried to remember my favorite vacation. There have been many. Europe, Mexico. The National Parks — Yellowstone specifically and Yosemite, too.Canada ranks right up there near the top — Whistler and the mountains and sea coming together in such grand glory.

But recently I have had the pleasurable experience of getting to know Kentucky’s state parks. They are fabulous. Well cared for, great lodges, with good food and plenty to do for all ages. From camping and hiking, to golf and swimming, the Kentucky chain of state parks is a wonderful asset to a state with glorious national resources.

Oklahoma also has some fine state parks with equally GOOD LODGES, BUT I don’t find as many of them at the level of the Bluegrass state’s.  The Commonwealth has outdone itself in accommodating guests at its parks. From the mountains to the lakes, from Civil and Revolutionary war battlefields to peaceful pockets carved into the side of timbered mountains, Kentucky has a rich heritage of making guests feel right at home.

Job well done, Kentucky. I look forward to visiting even more of your fine parks. Recreation at its finest is truly re-creation. And that is just what your parks do for me. 

Thank you.