without dissolving into tears. But the portrait is in
keeping with the ruthless monarchy that Davis takes great pains
to portray.
As I said above, the main focus is Kennedy's short-lived
"dynastic" presidency. And this is where some real questions
about Davis' methodology and intent arise. As he does in his
assassination book Mafia Kingfish, Davis proffers a long
bibliography to create the impression of immense scholarship and
many hours quarrying the truth out of books, files, and
libraries. But, like the later book, the text is not footnoted.
So if the reader wishes to check certain facts, or locate the
context of a comment or deduction, he is generally unable to do
so. But fortunately, some of us have a background that enables us
to find out where certain facts and deductions came from. This is
crucial. For in addition to his wild inflation about the
prominence of the Kennedy family in the power elite, another of
Davis' prime objectives is to reverse the verdict of the Church
Committee and place Kennedy in the center of the CIA plots to
kill Castro.
Pinning the Plots on Kennedy
As I said in Part One of this article, there is no evidence of
such involvement in either the CIA's Inspector General report of
1967, or in the Church Committee's report, Alleged Assassination
Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, issued in late 1975. In fact,
both advance evidence and conclusions to indicate the contrary.
So how does Davis propagate that the Kennedy brothers knew about,
authorized, and encouraged the plots? The first method is by
performing minute surgery on the 1975 report. Davis states that
Allen Dulles briefed JFK on the plots at a November 27, 1960
meeting with the President-elect. He uses Deputy Director Dick
Bissell as his source for this disclosure (Davis, p. 289). I
turned to the committee report that dealt with Bissell's
assumptions on this matter (Alleged Ass