Tea at Trianon: A New JFK Assassination Revelation

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 6, 2024

A New JFK Assassination Revelation

From Vanity Fair:

After much prodding and reflection, Landis, now 88, made the decision to begin laying out his recollections for publication. Because I have written three books on presidential history, and because Landis’s publisher, Chicago Review Press, happens to be my publisher, an editor there asked me to read a copy of the galley and offer my comments, which I did quite eagerly. In fact, I was so taken with Landis’s backstory and, upon spending time with him, so drawn to the facets of his tale that are not answered in the book (whose details were first reported in The New York Times), that I probed further, maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, as I got to know him during more than a dozen meetings this past year, I was won over by his integrity and by the way his account of what he witnessed in Dallas—and in the grave months of American mourning that followed—remained consistent and unwavering. Over time, Landis and I became close. As a result, I am writing this assessment of his narrative (and of his motives for coming out with his story) not only as a historian and armchair investigator but as Landis’s confidant.
Twenty-three-year-old Paul Landis applied to become a Secret Service agent in 1958. He came from Worthington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, and had graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University 15 months earlier. A neighborhood boy, Bob Foster, who was friends with Landis’s sister, had joined the Secret Service two years before. After speaking with Foster, Landis thought being in the Secret Service sounded like the “coolest job in the universe.” (Read more.)