History Commons^™

The Cia And The Jfk Assassination, Pt. 2, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

In the 1970s several Congressional investigations discovered there had been a disturbing pattern of misconduct by the CIA in regard to the Warren Commission’s investigation of the JFK assassination. The Agency had engaged in a cover-up by suppressing information it should have disclosed to the Commission, and in still other ways it had impeded the Commission’s investigation.

CIA documents subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act or the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act expand our awareness of the Agency’s misconduct.

The Cia And The Jfk Assassination, Pt. 1, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

At the time President Kennedy was gunned down, the CIA could not possibly have been unfamiliar with the alleged assassin, ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. Unless it was comatose, Oswald must have been a person of interest to the Agency long before the assassination. In 1957–58, Oswald had been stationed as a radar operator at the Atsugi Naval Air Base in Japan, where there was a major CIA station and from which the Agency’s U2 spy planes flew high-altitude missions over the Soviet Union; in 1959, the CIA knew, Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union, announced he had secrets to …

Jfk: Covered And Smothered, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

"If we could run the Zapruder film in reverse, patch up the president’s gruesome head wound, send the bullets flying back to the chambers whence they came, return the assassins to their sinister underworld and back up the Lincoln convertible so that Jack and Jackie are once again waving to the crowds in the Texas sunshine, then we could also walk backwards through the last 30 years, becoming younger and more hopeful, forgetting tragedies one after the other, arriving finally at a point of innocent stasis where we can stand forever watching the American sunrise with immortal delight. But we …

Due Process As Separation Of Powers, Nathan S. Chapman, Michael W. Mcconnell

Scholarly Works

From its conceptual origin in Magna Charta, due process of law has required that government can deprive persons of rights only pursuant to a coordinated effort of separate institutions that make, execute, and adjudicate claims under the law. Originalist debates about whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were understood to entail modern “substantive due process” have obscured the way that many American lawyers and courts understood due process to limit the legislature from the Revolutionary era through the Civil War. They understood due process to prohibit legislatures from directly depriving persons of rights, especially vested property rights, because it was …

Book Review: Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy (2007), Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Book Review of RECLAIMING HISTORY: THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY by Vincent Bugliosi (NY: W.W. Norton, 2007)

Jfk Blown Away -- Hooray! Kennedy's Dallas Visit Roiled Hate Groups, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Exactly 43 years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, 46-year old President John F. Kennedy was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, TX.

Dallas was then, as Matthew Smith notes in JFK: THE SECOND PLOT (1992), "the southwest hate capital of Dixie... In its politics and in its people, Dalls represented the right wing as far as it could go." Before and during his Dallas visit, local right-wingers busied themselves to make JFK unwelcome. They were angry and indignant that JFK was coming to their city. In fact, at the very time shots were being fired at …

The Death Flight Of Larry Mcdonald, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Twenty years ago, on Thursday, Sept. 1, 1983, Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald suffered a horrible death when a Soviet fighter interceptor shot down the Boeing 747 airliner he was aboard over the Sea of Japan. The 268 other persons on the plane also perished. The airliner, Korean Air Lines 007, on its way to Seoul, South Korea, had twice entered Soviet airspace and was downed as it was about to leave Soviet airspace for the second time.

Book Review: The Betrayal Of America: How The Supreme Court Undermined The Constitution And Chose Our President (2001), And Supreme Injustice: How The High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (2001), Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Book Review of THE BETRAYAL OF AMERICA: HOW THE SUPREME COURT UNDERMINED THE CONSTITUTION AND CHOSE OUR PRESIDENT, by Vincent Bugliosi (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001), and SUPREME INJUSTICE: HOW THE HIGH COURT HIJACKED ELECTION 2000, by Alan Dershowitz (Oxford University Press, 2001).

The Eponymous Mr. Prince, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

An eponym, the dictionary tells us, is a name formed from the name of a person to designate a place, and an eponymous person is someone for whom a place has been named. Prince Avenue, the wide Athens street which stretches west almost exactly two miles from Pulaski Street to the Jefferson Road, is an eponym. Described as “once one of the nation’s finest boulevards” by Frances Taliaferro Thomas in her excellent book A Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County (1992), but now dotted with professional buildings, fast food businesses, and parking lots, Prince Avenue was named after a …

A Civil War Lynching In Athens, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Recently, while reading E. Merton Coulter's classic history of antebellum Athens, College Life in the Old South (UGA Press, 1983 reprint), I came across a reference on page 247 to an Athens lynching occurring early in the Civil War. Having checked into the matter, I can now announce that, indeed, there definitely was at least one lynching in Athens prior to 1882. This lynching, possibly but not probably the first lynching in Athens, took place on Wednesday, July 16, 1862.

"Bloody Injuries:" The Lynchings In Oconee County, 1905-1921, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

In an article entitled “The Last Lynching in Athens,” published in the Flagpole on Sept. 10, 1997, I recounted the tragic story of the only lynching incident in Clarke County since lynching statistics began. It happened in February 1921. The victim, a black man named John Lee Eberhart, was wrested from an Athens jail by a mob and burned at the stake. By contrast, in our sister county, Oconee County, until recently far less populous than Clarke County, there have been at least two, perhaps three, lynching incidents during the same period. At least 10 and possibly 11 persons were …

The Last Lynching In Athens, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

It happened the evening of Wednesday, Feb. 16, 1921. It began in downtown Athens when a mob forcibly attacked the Athens courthouse, and ended less than two hours later when the prisoner seized by that mob was burnt alive six miles away in an adjoining county. It was the most tragic event in the history of Clarke county. It was the last lynching in Athens.

The Athenian Who Died In The Alamo, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

Someone from our city, Athens, Georgia, died in the Alamo on March 6, 1836, fighting for freedom and the cause of Texas Independence. An Athenian was one of the outnumbered, brave men who died heroically defending the Alamo in the famous battle that brought them eternal glory and brought infamy to Mexican Gen. Santa Anna, who ordered every defender of the Alamo slain.